FEROX

1 Sep, 2022

Fostering and Enabling AI, Data and Robotics Technologies for Supporting Human Workers in Harvesting Wild Food (FEROX) is an Innovation Action project under Horizon Europe framework.

Wild berries and mushrooms are considered to be a national treasure of Nordic countries. These food products require zero resources to cultivate as they grow naturally in the forests. It is estimated that less than 10% of the total annual wild berry crop is harvested from the forests. The main challenge in collecting wild berries lies in the manual forest harvesting, namely pickers’ working conditions. Due to the short season, the majority of the work is conducted by foreigners with limited knowledge of the language, culture and forests.

The FEROX project aims to utilize advances in AI, data and robotics to improve the working conditions of wild berry pickers and optimize picking operations.

Duration: 01/09/2022 – 31/08/2025

Project website: https://ferox.fbk.eu/

The main objectives of the FEROX project are:

To improve wild-berry picking yields and working conditions through AI, big-data and drones.
To optimize operations and help workers to more easily locate and predict ripe berry harvests.
To demonstrate how we can improve the wild berry business.

Automated production management

CPS is also of particular interest for production strategy and supply chain engineering. The control of production systems through CPS operating with robust optimisation algorithms in real time allows the recalculation of production schedules in the event of unexpected events (machine stoppages, lack of materials, urgent orders, etc.). This enables direct reprogramming of automatic and semi-automatic machines, speeding up production and minimising downtime.

Additionally, this automated production management can be combined with the generation of automatic changes in the task masters of the operators, as these are still very present in many small companies with low levels of digitisation. In this way, a rebalancing of workloads can be achieved, maximising the efficiency of production systems.