Harnessing the Potential of Co-Creation for Automation & Robotics in Agrifood

Robs4Crops has embraced the concept of co-creation. The goal is to approach issues from a new perspective and come away with a fully autonomous robotic system tailored to the needs of end-users. In this light, the Robs4Crops team is about to organize Co-Design Sessions (CoDS) for each Large Scale Pilot to collect, understand and embed the needs of end-users into its iterative design process.

We put the farmers and end-users at the heart of everything we do: from user requirements analysis to iterative testing and the business model experimentation process. The trials will be conducted in partnership with commercial farms and business leaders from France, Greece, Spain, and The Netherlands.

Each of the Co-Design sessions in Robs4Crops will be managed by a facilitator, in order to ensure their preparation, Robs4Corps partners organized an online training session for them.

To make these sessions efficient Bertrand Pinel (Terrena – France), Markos Legas (Pegasus – Greece), Oriol Serra (Serrater – Spain), Han Hilbrands (Smart Agri Technology – NL) and Bram Veldhuisen (Wageningen University & Research – NL) shared their knowledge and methodology of CoDS based on their experience of already successful implementations of CoDS in other projects.

During this training session, all the topics that will be discussed during the CoDS have been addressed: functions of the robotic systems, environmental impacts, opportunities and barriers to spread robots, etc.

The first 4 CoDS will take place between 10th October and 10th November 2021.