Marija Popović:
Agriculture with Intelligent Robots: Mapping and Planning for Active Sensing

Marija Popović is a Junior Research Group Leader at the University of Bonn and Cluster of Excellence “PhenoRob”. Before starting in Bonn, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Smart Robotics Lab at Imperial College London, UK. She received her Ph.D. from the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, Switzerland (2019) and did her Master in Engineering in Integrated Mechanical & Electrical Engineering at the University of Bath, UK (2015). Her research centres around developing algorithms that enable intelligent robotic decision-making, including in planning/coordination, environmental mapping, and computer vision.

Agricultural robots are rapidly replacing conventional farming methods at higher levels of precision, safety, and time- and cost-efficiency. However, a key challenge to realise their full potential is developing new algorithms enabling intelligent, autonomous operation in modern farming workflows with minimal human intervention. This talk will discuss how new research can bridge this gap; enabling robots to sense, reason, and act by themselves to optimise the use of their limited computational resources and battery life. We present our recent developments in environmental mapping and informative planning for autonomous decision-making, focusing on applications of targeted field inspection in precision agriculture.

Co-authors/co-researchers: Liren Jin, Julius Rückin
Liren Jin and Julius Rückin are PhD students in Marija Popović’s research group at the University of Bonn and Cluster of Excellence “PhenoRob”.

This work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy -EXC 2070 – 390732324.