Lessons Learned in Vineyard Monitoring and Protection from a Ground Autonomous Vehicle

Vineyard protection is a key task for winegrowers to maximize crop yield. Control of plagues, fungi and other threats are recurrent tasks in winery. This project is focused on the improvement of plague control tasks, specifically on the distribution and placement of pheromone dispensers for matting disruption, currently a labour-intensive and time consuming task. The operators walk through the vineyard hanging the dispensers in a regular distribution pattern. Grape project aims to automate the dispenser distribution in the vineyard using an outdoor autonomous ground platform with a robotic arm. Furthermore our platform is used to monitor the vineyard status and retrieve this information to the producer in order to to provide timely and precise information from the field.