Horticulture is suffering acute productivity challenges with the running of farms at current scale becoming impossible.The sector is facing a chronic labour crisis, which accounts for over 50% of growing costs for high cropping soft-fruits such as strawberries. A rise in farm-gate strawberry prices of just 23% against minimum wage increases of 77% since 2010 have squeezed grower margins to the limit with a huge mismatch between the much-increased cost of production and the prices growers receive from retailers who are their main customers. Additionally a lack of labour availability due to trends affected by the pandemic, Brexit and the Ukraine war has led to 44% of growers employing seasonal workers reporting a shortfall in 2021\. This has led to high levels of waste and with uncertainty in their operations, growers reducing future cropping areas. Future requirements such as the drive to Net Zero and regulation of pesticides further compound the challenges to fruit growers. Increasing farmland productivity is therefore a critical factor in ensuring the future of UK fruit growing in the wider context of a global growing population and all while minimising additional CO2 emissions, ideally shrinking the ecological footprint of horticulture. AI's capabilities are well suited and pivotal to the future of horticulture- leveraging vast datasets that can transform operations and decision making. Today's practises requires experienced staff to walk the crop and attempt subjective assessments of crop health and yield resulting in sampling small patches as indicators for the entire field, with incomplete/generalised assessments. AI fruit scouting holds immense potential to drive the precision and system-level transformation that will help farmers achieve higher returns with lower resources and unlock new value. Antobot is uniquely placed within the global agriculture industry with the ability to develop software, embedded hardware and robotic platforms to create highly integrated, capable, affordable customer-focused AI systems. The project will build on the foundations and proof-of-concept from IUK Project Insight for an autonomous robotic fruit scouting AI system and embed operationally the next-generation AI data analytics with multiple fruit growers to learn and unlock the next level of on-farm decision making and productivity.

Current tree fruit production applies crop management products uniformly across each orchard, however, orchards exhibit substantial variation across them and between trees. Even neighbouring trees have very different growth and crop loads. Treating all trees uniformly regardless of their size, density, crop load, or health limits yield, is inefficient, and detrimental to the orchard productivity and the environment. This project will develop a Precision Variable Rate Spray (PVRS) machine, control software system, and new systems for measuring and assessing each individual trees' status. These components will be combined into products and services that will transform the tree fruit industry and deliver new levels of environmentally sustainable crop production, increasing efficiency and yield whilst lowering costs and environmental impacts. Integral to this approach is that every individual tree in the orchard will be assessed, its requirements calculated, and then treated with a tailored quantity of crop management products. This will reduce wastage and improve yields. Led by one of the UK's leading and forward-thinking agronomy companies, this project includes a range of high quality growers, a large top fruit marketing organisation, a software engineering company specialising in global positioning systems, a top fruit digital agronomy company, a crop phenotyping specialist, a robotics company, a horticultural engineering company, the UK's agricultural chemical regulation organisation, and three academic institutions specialising in agricultural engineering and robotics, computer science, economics, and horticultural agronomy. Working closely across the tree fruit industry's production chain ensures that the products and services developed during the project are designed for the grower and meet their requirements. The consortium's network allows us to engage with the wider fruit industry. The project will showcase the products and services to the horticulture sector with a range of knowledge exchange activities and field demonstrations. During the project we will assess the new spray system's benefits relative to conventional spraying, and report on the economic and environmental advantages of investing in Precision Variable Rate Spraying. At the end of the project, UK growers will have access to the most advanced and efficient tree fruit crop management system available, and understand the environmental and economic benefits of using the system.

The **FLEXBOT** project aims to improve labour productivity in English soft fruit farming operations by integrating collaborative logistics robots (cobots) into the farms. Lead partner **Fox Robotics** will develop and showcase three primary outcomes: demonstrating the feasibility of supply chain interoperability between suppliers, exploring a sustainable business model for small to medium-sized fruit and crop farmers, and establishing an autonomous fruit-farming cobot undertaking various logistics tasks. The project aims to illustrate English fruit farms' scalable productivity and profitability while encouraging a small ecosystem of add-on suppliers and demonstrating the potential for cobot integration into other farm types. The project is a multidisciplinary collaborative R&D activity that aims to align with Defra recommendations and remediate significant fragmentation between technology providers and end-users. Fox Robotics will work with **Agri-EPI Centre**, **three British fruit farms**, and the **University of Surrey** on this project and hire four small innovative businesses to improve their value proposition to farmers by providing complementary technology, products, and services that can be integrated into the cobot platform and scaled as farmers invest in their fleet. The FLEXBOT project aims to move the fragmented and siloed Agri-tech industry towards standardisation using mobile cobot platforms.

Horticulture is suffering a labour productivity crisis. A rise in farm gate prices for strawberries since 2010 of just 23% \[_Defra_\] versus minimum wage increases of 77% in the same period \[_HomeOffice_\] have squeezed growers' margins to the absolute limit. Meanwhile a lack of labour availability, with 44% of growers employing seasonal labourers reporting a shortfall \[_Defra-2021_\], has made the running of many farms at current scale impossible. There are only two possible answers to this twin labour threat of cost and availability: shrink the size of the industry dramatically, ceding the market to foreign competition, or develop and invest in the tools to massively boost labour productivity. AREA-H is squarely aimed at the latter. The UK Food Strategy recognises that autonomous machines are providing an increasingly essential role within horticulture, with the transformative potential to solve the labour crisis, increase productivity, resilience and also decrease the environmental impact of farming. However, uptake of robotics by UK farms is low compared to other industrialised nations despite the sector facing many critical challenges (including labour availability, rising costs, and climate change pressures). To enable the transition to autonomous fleets at scale, robust robot localisation and navigation is key for high confidence operations and low levels of supervision. Current tech focuses on semi-autonomous navigation systems for high-cost large-scale equipment that are not operational in the unique mixed environment of horticulture - where polytunnels/greenhouses interfere with signals (such as GPS) and where high levels of human density are present - therefore horticulture-specific solutions are needed. The project Accelerating Robotics and Embedding Autonomy in Horticulture (AREA-H) has assembled a world-class collaboration between technology leaders bringing expertise in robotic harvesting, AI and embedded controls, horticulture growing systems and state-of-the-art autonomous-operation research - necessary to realise the transformative impact of robotics to UK horticulture growers.

The UK wine industry is growing rapidly in size and in sophistication. But even as British wines are winning more and more awards, the industry faces rising labour costs, changing climate conditions, and pressure to reduce reliance on fertilisers and chemical agents. We believe the solution to these challenges is to adopt a data-driven approach to farming. The vineyard of the future will be built on software systems that understand where the crop is and what its condition is. The autonomous farming systems of the future will run on high resolution maps of the vineyard, showing them the location of each vine, row, post, irrigation pump and more. The VISTA project is developing the digital maps that will drive the shift to data-driven farming. We are building the VISTA-Map, an open source mapping protocol that can be used on any commercial vineyard in the UK or in the rest of the world. The map will be high resolution, easy to integrate with other farming systems, and will support data from a variety of sources. Using drones and ground robot systems, we will create high resolution maps of several UK vineyards and use them in two practical applications. First, the VISTA-Map will then be used to generate high accuracy harvest yield estimates for the vineyards. Having better yield forecasts before harvest will allow growers to secure a better price for their crop, and reduce the amount of crop that is wasted because it cannot be sold. Second, the VISTA-Map will be used to create precision application maps, where chemical agents or fertilisers are applied in varying rates using GPS-guided machinery. Using precision techniques like this is common in other areas of farming, and results in reductions of chemical usage and increases in crop yield. The project consortium will also explore how the VISTA-Map could be expanded into a full vineyard digital twin, capturing and modelling aspects of the crop such as weather and climate, soil health, disease mapping and irrigation. To achieve this project, we have assembled a fantastic consortium for this work. Partners bring expertise in viticulture, crop monitoring, drones, robot systems, and 3D and semantic mapping. The VISTA project is a clear route for the UK vineyard industry to move to data-driven farming, providing a solid foundation of data to tackle the problems facing growers in the present and the future.

Viticulture is an expanding sector in the UK with up to 500 vineyards and an increasing interest to expand established areas, but the sector is currently at a crossroads. Advancements in digital technology deployed in other sectors make it easier to capture and manage data and gain insights for effective decision making. Growers, agronomists and AgriTech solution providers are looking at the application of these technologies but there are obstacles to overcome particularly around data sharing and integration. Existing AgriTech solutions have largely been developed in isolation with their own data model driven by the vendor and the application, and when a grower is using multiple different systems, they are frustrated that these systems do not talk to one another making effective decision making more difficult. Some systems appear to be designed to ensure customer retention however there are technical problems in the absence of an industry standard. Overcoming these barriers and creating an open access, industry standard geo-spatial data model will provide new opportunities and accelerate innovation for precision viticulture. Creating a digital infrastructure within a vineyard, mapping all the critical features such a posts, vines and pathways and other infrastructure like boundaries, irrigation points and converting this geospatial information into an open source dataset will allow multiple AgriTech solutions to be deployed without the need to survey on each occasion, therefore saving time and money, and allowing a grower to choose between multiple potential solution providers with the confidence that each would be able to navigate around the vineyard with a drone, robot or tractor based upon the information provided by the grower. The nature of deploying this technology will provide agronomic data on crop growth, stress incidences, and yield which will enable effective decisions to be made on targeted inputs, therefore increasing environmental, economic, and social sustainability of this expanding sector, and create a broader audience for innovative solutions. By creating and developing a digital solution tailored by and for the benefit of the viticulture industry will ensure the outcome will fit the needs of the end users

Farming of crops, horticulture and cereals has seen unprecedented challenges, with sustainability issues, workforce shortages and tightening financial constraints exacerbated by COVID-19 and Brexit. There is a growing need to find alternative transformative solutions. The proposed fully-autonomous machinery offers the potential to ease the burden of crop-scouting on time-poor growers and allow for improved use of resources at an affordable price. During this 12-month project, the team will develop an autonomous platform to integrate UAVs with UGVs, offering capacities such as auto-calibration of cameras, auto-docking and auto-charging of the UAV. The system will be tested and demonstrated on a farm.

This ambitious innovative project is to deliver an Automatic Track Width Adjustable System (ATWAS) for Agriculture Mobile Robots (AMRs). With a unique controls system and mechatronics design, the ATWAS system can automatically adjust the track width of the AMRs to the desired configuration within 60 seconds. By providing this much-needed adaptivity, the ATWAS system holds great potential to accelerate the deployment of the AMRs in the real world, helping to resolve the labour shortage caused by Covid-19\.