Fruit Attraction, knowledge and innovation center for the fruit and vegetable sector

Fruit Attraction, the world's foremost fruit and vegetable industry convention, featured GMV's participation in the round table “Agro Sustainability and Digitization: Data vs. the Story” organized by AMETIC. The convention was held in a context where the digital transformation of the agricultural food chain has become one of the main challenges for the agribusiness sector and where Spain, as a whole, has all the elements to export the agriculture of the future.

Ángel C. Lázaro Ríos, Head of Robotics and Automation for the Industry Sector, participated in the round table on how to promote innovation, sustainability and digitalization as fundamental drivers of growth in this leading sector of our economy. For his part, José Luis Molina, coordinator of the Smart Agro Working Group of AMETIC and CEO of Hispatec, was the moderator of the debate, which included other speakers from ABB, Fermín Torres, and Libelium.

During the debate, Ángel cited some examples to serve as a reference to promote a sector with great opportunities. Among others, he cited the precise positioning and navigation system for tractors, harvesters, and other systems that work autonomously in the field by using artificial intelligence as the technology to control the system and 5G to transmit large amounts of data and control commands. He also spoke on data platforms to monitor irrigation water quality and earth observation data to optimize crop cultivation, focusing on parameters such as the impact of certain weather conditions on forecasts for crop yields, pest risk, variety selection, etc.

The AgrarIA project, a consortium of 24 public and private organizations coordinated by GMV,  was one of the examples discussed in the debate as an initiative to research the use of artificial intelligence in the agricultural food value chain, specifically in production, processing and distribution. As part of the project's activities, GMV is developing a cloud robotics system to provide companies with outdoor circulation capacity to make their robots autonomous and carry out specific business tasks, detaching themselves from the whole control logic of the equipment and implementing pay-per-use. This project is funded through the R&D Missions in Artificial Intelligence Program of the State Secretariat for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence (SEDIA) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, corresponding to the funds of the Recovery, Resilience and Transformation Plan.