Catalogue of Infrastructures and Facilities

National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology  (INRIA)

This facility is a movable laboratory specifically designed to meet the requirements for providing Agrifood-TEF services. The Mobile Living Laboratory (MLL) is equipped with essential infrastructure such as power generators, ground (AGR) and aerial (UAV) robots, computing units, and a robust communication system supporting LAN, WiFi, and 4G/5G connectivity. It is tailored for testing, monitoring, and experimental activities and also includes basic living and working amenities to support up to three engineers during field operations. To support logistics, an external trailer is attached to the MLL, used for transporting ground and aerial robots, power backup systems, fuel supplies (petroleum, diesel, etc.), and other necessary equipment.

Facility

UAV Arena

National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology  (INRIA)

At ACENTAURI, we host a dedicated indoor UAV Arena measuring 5 meters x 6 meters x 7 meters, specifically designed for the development, testing, and demonstration of mobility algorithms for both Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Autonomous Ground Robots (AGRs). This facility offers a controlled and customisable indoor environment, making it ideal for preliminary experimentation and fine-tuning of robotics systems before deployment in real-world conditions. Elements such as lighting, spatial configuration, ground truth data, and object placement can all be tailored to suit specific research or industrial use cases.

Facility

Private Parking

National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology  (INRIA)

At INRIA, the private parking facility spans an area of 85 meters by 13 meters and is naturally enclosed by plants and trees, creating a semi-structured, forest-like environment. This makes it an ideal outdoor space for conducting development, testing, and validation experiments with Autonomous Ground Robots (AGRs) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Its dynamic setting bridges the gap between controlled indoor testing and fully unstructured field environments, allowing for safe and effective experimentation under realistic outdoor conditions.

Facility

NEF

National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology  (INRIA)

NEF is a multidomain scientific experimentation platform at INRIA, designed to support high-performance computation, storage, and visualisation for advanced research applications. It is built on a heterogeneous parallel computing architecture, combining multiple generations of high-performance servers into a cluster-based system. The platform features high-speed network interconnects and large-capacity storage and is directly connected to the Inria Sophia interactive visualisation platform, enabling seamless data processing and graphical analysis. Financed by INRIA, CPER, various research teams, and the Scientific Piloting Committee (CSPP), NEF provides a robust digital infrastructure for scientific innovation. This dedicated platform is widely used by PhD researchers, postdoctoral fellows, and the engineering team at ACENTAURI for a range of computational experiments. Access is managed through user accounts and containerisation, ensuring secure and efficient use of digital resources.

Facility

AzurArena Parking

National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology  (INRIA)

INRIA has access to a 100 m x 100 m reconfigurable outdoor facility located at AzurArena in Antibes, ideal for conducting experiments involving Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), Autonomous Ground Robots (AGRs), and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The site can be equipped with a 4G/5G communication network, enabling real-time connectivity and coordination across multiple robotic platforms. Its open and adaptable layout makes it suitable for both individual and collaborative autonomous system testing.

Infrastructure

Sophia

INRIA is the national research institute in digital sciences and technologies. World-class research, technological innovation, and entrepreneurial risk constitute its DNA. Within 220 project teams, most of them joint with major research universities, more than 3,800 scientists are exploring new avenues, often interdisciplinary and in collaboration with industrial partners, to respond to ambitious challenges. A technological institute, Inria supports the diversity of paths to innovation: from open-source software publishing to the creation of technological startups (Deeptech). The physical infrastructure at INRIA (named Sophia) used in the AGRIFOOD-TEF project is located in the Inria Centre of Côte d’Azur University in Sophia-Antipolis, France. It is managed by the ACENTAURI robotic team that studies and develops intelligent, autonomous, and mobile robots that can help humans in their day-to-day lives at home, at work, or during their displacements. The team focuses on perception, decision, and control problems for multi-robot collaboration by proposing an original hybrid model-driven/data-driven approach to artificial intelligence and by investigating efficient quantum algorithms. The team deals with robotic applications in smart territories, smart cities, and smart factories.

Infrastructure

HISPATEC Virtual Infrastructure

HISPATEC

Spain

Hispatec can design and deploy infrastructures ranging from simple solutions to complex, distributed architectures, ensuring that each project has the appropriate technological foundation to achieve its goals. Hispatec offers a wide range of technological infrastructure services tailored to the specific needs of each initiative:- Infrastructure on Microsoft Azure: As a Microsoft partner, Hispatec can deploy and manage infrastructures on Azure, including virtual machines, virtual networks, storage services, and managed databases. This enables leveraging services like Azure SQL Database, Azure App Service, and Azure Functions, providing enterprise-level scalability and security. - Services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP): Hispatec also has experience deploying infrastructures on GCP, utilising resources such as Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud Storage. This facilitates the implementation of cloud-native applications and the use of advanced analytics and machine learning services. - Traditional Architectures: For projects requiring more conventional environments, Hispatec can implement on-premise or cloud-based infrastructures using physical or virtual servers, configuring networks, storage systems, and backup and recovery solutions. - Containerised Environments: Hispatec uses technologies like Docker to create containerised environments, enabling more agile and consistent deployment of web applications. This improves portability and facilitates continuous integration and agile development. - Kubernetes Clusters for High Availability: To ensure high availability and scalability of applications, Hispatec deploys environments on Kubernetes clusters. This allows efficient orchestration of containers and management of dynamic workloads and ensures optimal performance even under variable demands. - Integration of Additional Services: Additionally, Hispatec can integrate services such as load balancers, content delivery networks (CDN), advanced security solutions, and monitoring and management tools to provide a complete and robust infrastructure.

Facility

East Garden

Test and validation of autonomous navigation and mapping solutions for UGVs, by quantification of the system performance metrics through comparison with millimeter accuracy ground truth data for an agricultural field with rough terrains.

Infrastructure

AgriRobot

The project focuses on enhancing mobility and enabling robots to perform precision tasks such as crop and weed management, monitoring, and recognition. The core focus is to develop a robust and highly accurate localisation and navigation system for autonomous agricultural robots, capable of operating efficiently in large, unstructured outdoor settings. A key component of this effort is the use of 3D high-precision mapping, which provides detailed characterisation of agricultural land. This 3D point cloud data is critical for understanding the varying topographies and plant distributions across the farm, facilitating more accurate navigation and task execution by robots. It also enables more efficient resource allocation and targeted interventions, ensuring better yield management and reducing waste. The entire solution operates at the edge, providing real-time data processing to support seamless robot navigation and decision-making in real-world farming scenarios.

Facility

Apple Orchards in Tres

For this purpose, LoRaWAN tensiometers are devices for measuring the soil moisture. A tensiometer consists of a vacuum gauge connected by a tube to a porous ceramic tip. The tube is filled with water. The ceramic tip is permeable, and the water in the tube saturates it. The tip is placed in contact with the soil in the root zone. Because the soil is normally not saturated, water is drawn from the tip into the soil. As water moves from the tube into the soil, a partial vacuum is created and measured by the gauge. This measurement is not a direct measurement of soil water content. Rather, it is a measurement of soil water tension (also called soil moisture tension). The level of pressure (tension) in the vacuum is an indication of the amount of energy needed by a plant to counter the strength with which the soil holds moisture and extract water from the soil. We installed in different fields for every measure point two tensiometers with different depths (30 cm and 60 cm). In this way we are able to measure the effect of water/soil moisture at different depths in the soil. Through the LoRa network we receive the soil moisture data from the sensors distributed in the field. Moreover, with the LoRAWAN valve, we are able to control water irrigation based on soil moisture data from tensiometers processed by AI algorithms. With this data and their elaboration, we are able to save water and make the irrigation process more efficient.

Facility

Vineyard in Rovere della Luna

For this purpose, tensiometer LoRaWAN are devices to measure the soil moisture. A tensiometer consists of a vacuum gauge connected by a tube to a porous ceramic tip. The tube is filled with water. The ceramic tip is permeable, and the water in the tube saturates it. The tip is placed in contact with the soil in the root zone. Because the soil is normally not saturated, water is drawn from the tip into the soil. As water moves from the tube into the soil, a partial vacuum is created and measured by the gauge. This measurement is not a direct measurement of soil water content. Rather, it is a measurement of soil water tension (also called soil moisture tension). The level of pressure (tension) in the vacuum is an indication of the amount of energy needed by a plant to counter the strength with which the soil holds moisture and extract water from the soil. We installed in different fields for every measure point one tensiometer with 30 cm depth (root depth). Through the LoRa network we receive the soil moisture data from the sensors distributed in the field. With this data and their elaboration, we are able to save water and make the irrigation process more efficient.

Infrastructure

LoRaWAN