Saarbrücken, Kaiserslautern, Bremen und Osnabrück, 11.07.2016
The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) can look back on many years of experience in the field of innovative technologies for agriculture. The DFKI bundles its extensive expertise in the new Competence Center Smart Agriculture Technologies (CC-SaAT) opened on July 1, 2016. The new center is intended to serve as a development and collaboration platform and central point of contact for partners from science and industry .
With the help of innovative AI - technology can manage a variety of tasks in agriculture. These include the various work processes along the entire value chain from field to fork. "Intelligent hardware and software systems are important to meet the economical challenges of modern, sustainable agriculture in many areas. Our new Competence Center Smart Agriculture Technologies combines the competencies of DFKI for this current application and provides a vendor-independent platform for technology innovation", said Prof. Dr. Dr. H. C. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster, CEO of DFKI management. The Competence Centre CC-SaAT based in Osnabrück is headed by Dr. Stefan Stiene and Dr. Ansgar Bernardi, who both work in the field of computer-based agricultural technologies for many years.
Artificial Intelligence provides technologies to support the people, for example in the cooperative planning and control of machines in complex and dynamic structures, such as agriculture. The focus of CC-SaAT is in particular to networking and communication technologies, autonomous control and robotics as well as georeferenced Smart Services, automated Big Data analysis and Deep Learning. For that purpose the competence center bundles the know-how of all DFKI research areas that develop innovative AI technologies with partners from industry and research in joint projects.
CC-SaAT will perform national and European research projects as well as direct contract work for industrial customers equally. The range of the application-oriented competence center includes both individual development of intelligent software solutions, technology transfer of international award-winning research, innovation advisory and scientific monitoring and the creation of market studies and feasibility studies.
DFKI has already cooperated successfully in the past with industrial partners of the agricultural economy, namely projects like marion and iGreen. In marion researchers and partners developed a planning system for agricultural machines that enables autonomous cooperation of machines in the field. The cooperation project iGreen aimed at a location based Services- and knowledge network for agriculture. Currently DFKI scientists are working in new collaborative project Odil on an open software platform that enables more efficient value added in agriculture by linking all actors along the value chain together while ensuring data security.