The European Union has set itself the challenge of becoming the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, through “The European Green Deal” agreement, where the environment and agriculture are highly relevant areas. In this regard, 25 countries signed the declaration A smart and sustainable digital future for European agriculture and rural areas, which emphasizes reducing the environmental impact of agricultural activities, as well as enhancing production security through the use of digital technologies, where robotics together with artificial intelligence are essential. This has led to the concept of Smart Agriculture or Agriculture 5.0, a model that is difficult for SMEs in the agricultural sector of the SUDOE region to adopt, due to the technological risk it entails, given technologies that are not sufficiently mature along with the high investment required. This situation is further aggravated in the case of robotic technologies, which require highly personalized solutions, and therefore, this will be the challenge to be solved jointly by the consortium of this proposal. With this background, the objective of the present project proposal is based on the creation of an ecosystem capable of identifying agricultural processes that, through robotics, can be more environmentally sustainable and design services and protocols (based on living-labs with digital twins) that lead to their implementation. With this, the aim is to involve SMEs in the agricultural sector of the SUDOE region, both producers and service providers, in the Agriculture 5.0 model. To this end, cooperation is required from research entities expert in the different technologies involved in robotics, working jointly with specialists in agricultural processes and environmental sustainability. Thus, the innovation of this project lies in taking a step forward in the digitalization of agricultural processes through the incorporation of robotics.
