What is your role in FEROX?

I'm the project coordinator which means that I have the task of making sure that all of the teams' enthusiasm and skills are steered in a common direction, to not only fulfill the promises of the project, but also to create a useful solution at the end. We've got a great team and a lot of experience and it's been a pleasure so far.

How does your expertise contribute to the overarching goals of the FEROX project?

I've coordinated several EU projects, and together with my research background in computer vision and AI I feel that I can also contribute to technical developments and not just management tasks. Of particular interest to me is the challenge of autonomously sending drones into dense forests without crashing and asking AI solutions to find tiny berries inside bushes. I've worked on several projects that deal with finding objects in a scene from a mobile camera, but never anything so small. This area of research will hopefully be re-deployable in other future challenges too.

What were the primary considerations when designing the FEROX project?

Good question. I think that the spark that started the project was to do something that had not been done before in an outdoor 'food production' setting. Naturally the fruits we are looking for are not cultivated so there is a great deal of randomness about where to find them. I've picked wild berries myself for many years and it's always a challenge to find them. This personal curiosity was for sure a starting point. We were, and I guess still are to a lesser extent, concerned about the human acceptance of drones and AI in forests where people may be, and so this bringing together of new technologies and ancient traditions is raising many really interesting questions.  In addition to acceptance is also the practicality aspect. The solutions we create must be affordable, easy to use and robust; difficult demands to balance when proposing a breakthrough solution.