SMASH R&D project

AvMap takes part to SMASH, a project aiming to create a collaborative, modular and integrated robotic ecosystem applied to Precision Agriculture, for the monitoring and sustainable management of agricultural crops.

Private partners: Yanmar R&D Europe, EDI, Base, Seintech, Copernico, Giuntini Filippo

Universities: Florence University, IIT (Italian Institute of Technology), Sant’Anna Bio Robotic Institute.


 

To help farmers realize healthy, high-value production with a true technological system

SMASH stands for ‘Smart Machine for Agricultural Solutions Hightech’, and it is a project  co-financed by the Tuscany local government. It consists of the development of a modular robotic platform that employs the latest information communications technology to examine crops and soils, analyses gathered information and provides clear, actionable information to farmers to support crop management. 

SMASH is not a single machine, but a series of different devices including a robot, base station, drones and field sensors that together provide vital information to help farmers. SMASH is a system that is designed to function across a range of precision agriculture technologies, offering specific insights on geomatics, robotics, data mining, machine learning etc, while taking into account the environmental and social issues facing farmers. AvMap's important contribution to the project was to provide sensors, receivers and navigation technology for the robotic base. 
 

A farmer could programme the task that he wants SMASH to carry out, and while he is involved in other activities, this machine could move autonomously, monitoring crops, detecting and treating diseases, and saving the farmer or his workers significant time out in the fields manually checking crops. 

The applications are endless:

• Monitoring: through appropriate sensors, the SMASH system could allow accurate measuring and calculating the real needs of the plants, in an extremely precise way;

• The robotic base could perform targeted interventions in the field: mechanical weeding, administration of variable rate products, cleaning of the field from foreign bodies, and much more. 

 

There are two working SMASH prototypes, one for grapevines and the other for spinach, that have been tested in Tuscany. 
 

AvMap research to find new technological solutions for a sustainable farming does not stop,stay in touch!