The workshop brought together all the research teams whose projects were selected in this call, focusing on robotics and digital technologies for sustainable agriculture. MULTIFUSE, a project with participation from Vicorob, is one of the six funded projects addressing how robotics and digital technologies can support more sustainable agricultural practices.

This first meeting provided a valuable opportunity to network with other international teams, exchange perspectives, and start shaping collaboration between European and Japanese partners.

Robotics and digital technologies for sustainable agriculture

On January 31, 2025, the EIG CONCERT-Japan initiative announced the six selected projects of its 11th joint call on digital transformations and robotics in sustainable agriculture.

MULTIFUSE: artificial intelligence for plant stress detection

The MULTIFUSE project focuses on advanced multimodal sensing and data fusion for early digital detection of plant stress symptoms.

By combining data from various optical sensors, the research trains artificial intelligence to detect plant stress, such as water deficiency or infection, at a physiological level before it becomes visible to the human eye.

Other projects in robotics and agriculture

The six selected projects address sustainable agriculture through robotics, artificial intelligence, and digital technologies:

• HydroNPK-AI focuses on AI-enhanced NPK management for optimized hydroponic cultivation. Using real-time artificial intelligence, the system manages nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in hydroponic setups to maximize yield while reducing chemical runoff.
• DRAGONS develops drones equipped with robotic arms to autonomously collect plant samples such as leaves or fruit from complex vineyard canopies.
• DEMETER builds adaptive pruning robots through simulation, artificial intelligence, and intuitive teleoperation, allowing human experts to remotely guide robotic systems.
• DYNA-GROW focuses on dynamic lighting management systems and sustainable energy solutions for smart crop production, integrating renewable energy with intelligent lighting.
• Supporting Digital Solutions develops a framework to support the demonstration of sustainable digital solutions for agriculture and enable collaboration between Japanese and European startups.

Social sustainability in agriculture

In both Japan and Europe, the average farmer is over 60 years old. These projects aim to make agriculture physically easier and more attractive to younger generations through robotics and digital technologies.

International collaboration in robotics and sustainable agriculture

The workshop in Bonn marked the beginning of collaboration between the selected teams, enabling them to connect, exchange perspectives, and start working together in the field of robotics and sustainable agriculture.

Vicorob’s participation in MULTIFUSE is part of this international effort to explore how robotics and digital technologies can support more sustainable agricultural practices.

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Prof. Pere Ridao, Director of CIRS, and Dr. Roger Pi Roig are representing the team during the event.

Their participation is linked to the MEMLS laser project, supported by the AGAUR Producte programme. The project focuses on advancing underwater 3D laser scanning technologies aimed at improving high-resolution seabed mapping and inspection capabilities.

More information about the project can be found here.

The Vicorob team engaged with IQUA Robotics, a spin-off closely linked to the institute.

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On 18 November, Prof. Pere Ridao, Full Professor at the University of Girona and leading researcher at the Underwater Robotics Research Center (CIRS), took part in a key panel discussion at Maritime Hub 2025 in Barcelona. This landmark event, spearheaded by BlueNetCat and the Spanish Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, brought together top experts in maritime and marine innovation.

Prof. Ridao joined a roundtable moderated by Miquel de la Mano (Fundación BCN Port Innovation), alongside:

• Francesc Xavier Ferraro (COO of SEABOTS)
• Jordi Isern (Head of Operational Oceanography, ICATMAR)
• Vicenç Parisi (Coordinator, SARTI-UPC)
• Emma Cobos (Director of Innovation and Business Strategy, Port of Barcelona)
• Loubna Benabbou (Professor, University of Quebec at Rimouski)

The discussion focused on the market demands in marine robotics, addressing challenges in deployment, the need for robust telecommunications, and the current technological landscape. Key topics included the purpose of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), the types of data required for decision-making, and the necessary resolution levels.

Prof. Ridao brought deep insight into the operational constraints of underwater vehicles and emphasized the importance of shared autonomy and mission adaptability in complex marine environments. He also underscored the need for streamlined collaboration between public institutions, academia, and private companies, especially in Spain and Catalonia, where transversal governance in the blue economy remains limited.

BlueNetCat, the Blue Network for Catalonia, is a strategic alliance of research groups and institutions aimed at driving sustainable innovation in the marine and maritime sectors. It promotes cross-sector collaboration to foster smart, resilient solutions for the blue economy.

Read more about Maritime Hub 2025 here:  https://www.bluenetcat.eu/en/maritime-hub-2025/

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Hayat, alongside Michele Grimaldi (former research intern at CIRS and currently PhD student at Heriot-Watt University), presented the paper titled “Stonefish: Supporting Machine Learning Research in Marine Robotics”. The work, co-authored with members of our research group Patryk Cieslak, Eduardo Ochoa, and Nuno Gracias, was accepted to the main conference proceedings. It showcases recent enhancements to the Stonefish simulator and reinforces its position as a leading tool for research in marine robotics, consistently offering significantly greater capabilities than existing alternatives.

Hayat and Valerio were also part of the organizing committee of a workshop titled “AQ²UASIM: Advancing Quantitative and QUAlitative SIMulators for marine applications”, led by Michele. The aim of the workshop was to highlight the role of simulators in lowering the high entry barrier to underwater robotics and to foster dialogue around future directions for improving the realism, accessibility, and benchmarking capabilities of these tools to better meet the evolving needs of industry and academia. The workshop attracted strong interest from the community, drawing over 90 participants and featuring 25 accepted poster presentations.

Building on the panel discussions and community feedback, an initiative was undertaken to host a public GitHub repository to curate and disseminate a comprehensive collection of openly available underwater simulation platforms and datasets. This resource is intended to support research and foster collaboration across the underwater robotics community. The repository remains open to contributions, encouraging researchers to populate it with resources, tools, and datasets relevant to the field.

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Our participation consisted of the presentation of our current work for the projects BITER and PLOME. Specifically, we presented the results from last year’s oceanographic campaign on the Sarmiento de Gamboa vessel and the advances in the implementation of a path planning strategy to explore the Marine Protected Areas with the Girona1000 AUV in search for the marine fauna with acoustic pingers attached in the context of the BITER project.

This event provided a valuable platform for sharing our research, learning from other experts, and strengthening collaborations in marine technology.

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Oceanology International provided a valuable platform for us to connect with companies from which we have acquired equipment and those with whom we aim to collaborate in the future. Through insightful discussions and exchanges, we explored the latest advancements in marine science and ocean technology, gaining knowledge that will benefit the OPTIHROV project. 

We left the forum with an expanded network and a clearer vision for the future of our research.

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The five students participated in various workshops, challenges, and poster sessions. Valeriia Abramova, a second-year PhD student from the brain imaging research group, took part in the International Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) 2023 Africa sub-challenge and presented her work during the second day’s satellite events poster session. Uma Lal-Trehan and Cansu Yalcın, both first-year PhD students, participated in the Topology-Aware Anatomical Segmentation of the Circle of Willis (TopCoW) challenge, the first of its kind, and achieved remarkable results. Cansu Yalcın, along with Hasna Hamadache, a PhD candidate who couldn’t attend the conference, secured the 2nd and 3rd places in the binary classification sub-challenge for MRA and CTA images, respectively, and brought back two adorable Swiss toy cows as awards from Zurich.

Marawan Elbatel, a first-year PhD student from the breast imaging research group under the co-supervision of Dr. Robert Martí and Dr. Xiaomeng Li from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, claimed the 1st and 2nd places in the Surgical Instrument Segmentation in Endoscopic Videos challenge (EndoVis-SynIss) and the Pubic Symphysis-Fetal Head Segmentation and Angle of Progression (PS-FH-AoP-MICCAI 23) challenge, respectively. He was also honored with the Best Paper Award from the Distributed, Collaborative, and Federated Learning (DeCaF-MICCAI) workshop. Ricardo Montoya, another first-year PhD student from the breast imaging group, participated in the Tumor Detection, Segmentation, and Classification Challenge on Automated 3D Breast Ultrasound (ABUS) 2023, securing the 2nd place in the lesion segmentation sub-challenge. It’s worth mentioning that all five students are graduates of different batches from the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree in Medical Imaging and Applications (MAIA), coordinated by the University of Girona.

MICCAI conferences are well-known as a gathering place for researchers from around the world to present the latest advances in medical imaging. This year’s keynote speaker was Yann LeCun, a Turing Award laureate and a prominent figure in deep learning. He emphasized the power of self-supervised learning, the importance of open-source science, and the idea that AI is a positive tool for humans rather than a threat.

Another distinguished keynote speaker was Professor Mihaela van der Schaar from Cambridge University, who discussed her lab’s contributions to synthetic data generation, focusing on the creation of tabular data and the importance of multimodal data in unlocking the full potential of future AI algorithms.

During the three main conference days, there are six oral sessions with two simultaneous oral presentations, requiring participants to choose which sessions to attend. During these sessions, attendees have the opportunity to engage directly with authors and ask them questions about their work. Additional events such as CLINICCAI (an event dedicated to healthcare practitioners willing to discuss their research), Women in MICCAI, Fireside Chat with Stalwarts, and more, are organized to enhance the conference’s content.

One of the strengths of MICCAI is its ability to bring together state-of-the-art research in medical imaging AI applications from all over the world, spanning universities and companies. This provides an opportunity for networking, fostering collaborations, exposing students to cutting-edge developments, and enabling attendees to meet the individuals behind the research papers, models, and awards. MICCAI promotes the integration of the medical AI community and facilitates the exchange of knowledge and experiences among attendees and their local communities. As an experienced MICCAI participant might say, ‘You can watch all these presentations and read all these papers at home, but the networking experience, the one-to-one interaction, will never come close to what we have here if we just stay at home and make Zoom calls.

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Photo: https://bts.fer.hr/

Notably, Vicorob was an active participant in this year’s event, where they collaborated with their project partners to present their groundbreaking initiative, DeeperSense. DeeperSense is a pioneering project aimed at revolutionizing service robots’ environment perception capabilities. By enhancing their performance, reliability, and functionality, DeeperSense seeks to open up new horizons for robotics. This project employs a novel approach by harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence and data-driven Machine Learning / Deep Learning to merge the capabilities of non-visual and visual sensors. The objective is to elevate their combined environmental perception capabilities beyond what individual sensors can achieve.

Photo: https://bts.fer.hr/

DeeperSense has chosen underwater robotics as the domain to demonstrate and validate its innovative approach. This selection is strategic, as underwater robotics is recognized as one of the most challenging application areas for robot operation and environment perception. The project focuses on three use cases of significant societal and environmental relevance, driven by real-world needs. Throughout the project, a comprehensive set of training data will be generated, enabling the development of algorithms to be trained and verified both in the lab and during extensive field trials. These algorithms will be optimized to run on the onboard hardware of underwater vehicles, facilitating real-time execution to support autonomous robot behaviour. Moreover, both the algorithms and the data will be made publicly available through online repositories integrated into European research infrastructures.

The DeeperSense consortium comprises renowned experts in the fields of robotics, marine robotics, artificial intelligence, and underwater sensing. Research and technology partners collaborate closely with end-users from the three selected application areas. A key aspect of the DeeperSense dissemination strategy is to bridge the gap between the European robotics and AI communities, thereby strengthening European science and technology.

During the workshop, Vicorob, along with their project partners, had the opportunity to present their work to attendees, including colleagues from Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI) in Germany and the University of Haifa in Israel. This collaborative presentation allowed them to share their insights and findings with a wider audience.

Furthermore, the event included a competition where Valerio Franchi, a PhD student from Vicorob, achieved significant recognition by clinching the third prize in the “3-Minute Thesis” competition. This accomplishment stands as a testament to the quality and relevance of their work.

Photo: https://bts.fer.hr/

In conclusion, the BTS workshop proved to be a positive and fruitful experience for Vicorob and their project partners. They not only found interest in their project but also established connections with potential collaborators for future endeavours. The spirit of knowledge exchange and innovation that characterizes this event will undoubtedly continue to drive progress in maritime robotics and related fields.

Photo: https://bts.fer.hr/

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PLOME showcased its latest technology in ocean monitoring and exploration. Additionally, the consortium unveiled an advanced artificial intelligence system that uses machine learning algorithms to analyze large volumes of oceanic data and provide detailed information about the marine ecosystem. This system will enable scientists to better understand the impacts of climate change, the health of coral reefs, and marine biodiversity.

With its prominent participation at the Oceans 2023 Conference, the PLOME Consortium has reaffirmed its commitment to the exploration and monitoring of the oceans, driving technological advancements that allow for a deeper understanding of our valuable marine ecosystems.

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One of the workshops, Gaussian Belief Propagation, introduced an innovative algorithm utilizing a unified graph representation to solve distributed localization issues. The workshop demonstrated the use of visual tools to explain how this methodology works.

The second workshop, Geometric Algebra and dual quaternions, focused on the abstract representation of complex surfaces, using spaces of more than three dimensions, to represent motion. The workshop also showcased bivectors to represent structure and motion, leading to the development of dual quaternions, which can represent the Special Euclidean group.

Pau expressed his amazement at the latest research and advancements in the field of robotics and automation. The conference provided an excellent platform for experts and showcased ground-breaking innovations in various fields, including machine learning, autonomous systems, and human-robot interaction. Pau was delighted to have connected with industry professionals and shared his knowledge with other experts in the field.

With the experience he gained at ICRA 2023, Pau will expect an impact on the field of autonomous underwater vehicles as he continues his research with the Vicorob group.

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