Frontier stage
Keynote

Micro drones, macro harvests: Flying toward zero hunger

In person
  • Date
    11 July 2025
    Timeframe
    09:50 - 10:10 CEST
    Duration
    20 minutes
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    With the global population projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 (UN, 2022), ensuring food security has become one of humanity’s greatest challenges. Optimizing greenhouse cultivation efficiency will be crucial to meeting growing food demands sustainably. The main avenue towards this higher efficiency is “precision agriculture” in which crop is monitored and cared for at the single plant level. Drones flying in greenhouses will substantially enhance precision agriculture by swiftly capturing detailed, high-resolution digital data.

    I will present our work on the AI for swarms of small, light-weight drones flying autonomously in greenhouses. The small size of the drones allows them to fly in narrow areas such as between tomato plants. Moreover, their light weight makes them inherently safe for flight around humans and sensitive crop. However, making such tiny drones fly completely by themselves is an enormous challenge. In my talk, I will explain how we draw inspiration from flying insects for achieving autonomous flight of tiny drones. I will demonstrate a flapping wing drone on stage, and will show some of our latest research on neuromorphic AI, which promises to reduce the computational and energy demands for onboard AI with orders of magnitude.