Research
LIAT’s key subject pillars are robotic phenotyping, selective harvesting, crop care, sustainability, productivity and people, and rural policy and the food environment. This interdisciplinary approach encourages collaboration across academic disciplines, to achieve the best results for the future of agriculture.
Part of LIAT, our research at Lincoln Agri-Robotics centres around three grand challenges and a number of core technologies.
Selective Harvesting
What it is: Developing systems which identify harvest ready crops to enable reliable and consistent picking and harvesting.
Our Goal: Reducing the reliance on manual picking of crops by developing automated robotic platforms that can pick soft fruit at the optimum time.
Crop Care
What it is: Ensuring the protection of crops from pests, disease, weather and nutrient deficiencies.
Our Goal: Enhancing modern precision agriculture techniques to drive productivity by optimising the microenvironment of individual plants rather than assuming the collective crop is a uniform mono-culture.
Phenotyping Robotics
What it is: Measuring and analysing plant traits such as growth rate, colour, shape, leaf and root characteristics to understand the influence of environmental factors on plant varieties.
Our Goal: Offering a route to automate phenotyping at scale to select for desirable characteristics within the plant breeding process.
Together, these grand challenges work towards a collective objective to understand how humans and technology interact with the world through research on critical issues including sustainability, resilience, values, integrity and trust.
Across all challenges, Carbon Net Zero is a key consideration.