multi-purpoSe Physical-cyber Agri-forest Drones Ecosystem for governance and environmental observation

Food, Bioeconomy & Natural ResourcesHORIZON-RIAID: 101060778
EC Contribution
€58,167
Consortium Size
21 orgs
Start Year
2022
Summary

Τhe strategic objective of SPADE is to develop an Intelligent Ecosystem to address the multiple purposes concept in the light of deploying UAVs to promote sustainable digital services for the benefit of a large scope of various end users in the sectors of agriculture, forestry, and livestock. This includes individual UAV usability, UAV type applicability (e.g., swarm, collaborative, autonomous, tethered), UAV governance models availability and trustworthiness. Multi-purposes will be further determined in the sensing dataspace reusability based on trained AI/Machine Learning (ML) models. These will enable sustainability and resilience of the overall life cycle of developing, setting up, offering, providing, testing, validating, refining as well as enhancing digital transformations and ‘innovation building’ services in Forestry, Cropping and Livestock Farming. Pilot prototypes will contribute towards greater challenges such as deforestation, precision cropping and animal welfare. First, SPADE will create a digital platform that is able to realise the potential benefits to be reaped from the use of drones. This platform is making drone operations better accessible and controllable, as well as providing a service channel for value added services enabled by drones. Second, SPADE is demonstrating three innovative use cases of drones making use of the digital platform. While demonstrating the use cases, the benefits coming from the use of drones are analysed and quantified, on a detailed stakeholder level basis. This will demonstrate the new business opportunities. The demonstrations/pilots will also serve as an analysis platform to investigate the regulatory framework at international and national level. Open calls will provide 12 further use cases.

Consortium (21)

Project Results (27)

Source: CORDIS, the EU research results database.

Publications (16)
An Ultra-Light Seedling Planting Mechanism for Use in Aerial Reforestation
2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)· 2025DOI
Steffan Lloyd, Rasmus Astrup
Collectively resolving information asymmetries through data sharing clubs: agritech case study
IET Conference Proceedings· 2025DOI
Steve Brewer, Nikolai Kazantsev, Kyle Alves, Phil Godsiff, Michelle Pauli, Andrew McMillan, Simon Pearson
Digital Twins in Agriculture and Forestry: A Review
Sensors· 2025DOI
Aristotelis C. Tagarakis, Lefteris Benos, George Kyriakarakos, Simon Pearson, Claus Grøn Sørensen, Dionysis Bochtis
Revitalising food supply networks through trustworthy data sources: an emergent toolkit for data sharing clubs
IET Conference Proceedings· 2025DOI
Steve Brewer, Nikolai Kazantsev, Kyle Alves, Simon Pearson, Michelle Pauli
SkyPlanter: Aerial Reforestation With an Ultralight, Seedling–Planting Drone
IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics· 2025DOI
Steffan Lloyd, Thor Kamp Opstrup, Emad Samuel Malki Ebeid, Rasmus Astrup
The Governance and Regulations of Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the European Union – A Comparative Framework
Lecture Notes in Mobility, Transport Transitions: Advancing Sustainable and Inclusive Mobility· 2025DOI
Anssi Rauhala, Pekka Leviäkangas, Anne Tuomela
Advanced UAV edge computing ML solutions for livestock management
The XX CIGR World Congress 2022, December 5 - 9, 2022, Kyoto International Conference Center, Kyoto, Japan· 2024DOI
Aristotelis C. Tagarakis, Costas Davarakis, Alexander Loos, Dimitrios Kateris, and Dionysis Bochtis
Advanced UAV edge computing ML solutions for livestock management
The European Society of Agricultural Engineers 2024 Conference· 2024DOI
Aristotelis C. Tagarakis, Costas Davarakis, Alexander Loos, Christian Weigel, Maria Theologou, Niki Rovatsou, Oliver Doll, Dimitrios Kateris, and Dionysis Bochtis
AUTH-Sheep: An Annotated Video Dataset for Detection and Tracking of Sheep in UAV Imagery
4th International Workshop on Camera Traps, AI, and Ecology· 2024DOI
Oliver Doll, Alexander Loos
Chapter 11 - A gender perspective on drones and digital twins in a transdisciplinary European smart agriculture and forestry project
Eyes Above Fields· 2023DOI
Wendy Wuyts, Lizhen Huang
Chapter 12 - An overview of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) governance and regulatory frameworks in the European Union (EU)
Eyes Above Fields· 2023DOI
Anssi Rauhala, Anne Tuomela, Pekka Leviäkangas
Chapter 7 - Drones as functional parts of physical-cyber eco-systems
Eyes Above Fields· 2023DOI
Aristotelis C. Tagarakis, Lefteris Benos, Dimitrios Kateris, George Kyriakarakos, Dionysis Bochtis
Chapter 8 - Information management infrastructures for multipurpose unmanned aerial systems operations
Eyes Above Fields· 2023DOI
Lefteris Benos, Aristotelis C. Tagarakis, G. Vasileiadis, Dimitrios Kateris, Dionysis Bochtis
Comparison of Object Detection Algorithms for Livestock Monitoring of Sheep in UAV images
Workshop Camera Traps, AI and Ecology· 2023DOI
Oliver Doll, Alexander Loos
Robotics Framework for Object Tracking using FPGA with Novel Automatic Image Labelling
IEEE EUROCON· 2023DOI
Mads F. H⊘ffer, Karl-Emil S. Koldkjær, D, S⊘ren D. Abrahamsen, en, Victor D. Herlev, Frederik F. Nyboe, Nicolaj H. Malle, Emad Ebeid
SPADE: A paradigm for a multi-purpose cyber-physical agri-drones ecosystem
The XX CIGR World Congress 2022, December 5 - 9, 2022, Kyoto International Conference Center, Kyoto, Japan· 2022DOI
Dionysis Bochtis, George Kyriakarakos, Dimitrios Kateris, Aristotelis C. Tagarakis
Deliverables (11)