Catalogue of Services

Agri Drone Flight Operations

Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek (ILVO)

Location

At user's premises

Belgium

Arable farming

Greenhouse

Horticulture

Viticulture

Our Agri Drone Flight Operation service offers precision drone flights designed to collect essential data for agricultural analysis, whether for crop monitoring, land surveying, or environmental assessments. These flights utilise RGB, multispectral, hyperspectral, and thermal sensors to capture data. The data is collected with aims to help agribusinesses optimise resource management, detect crop health issues, pest management, and make informed decisions. Whether you need to test drone-integrated sensors, gather aerial imagery, or explore new analytics, this service provides a flexible and tailored approach to meet the specific needs of your operation. Customers will receive detailed data, advice, and insights that can be applied to enhance productivity, reduce costs, and support sustainable farming practices.

Crop Dataset Generation

Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek (ILVO)

Location

At user's premises

Belgium

Remote

Arable farming

Greenhouse

Horticulture

Tree Crops

Viticulture

In the Crop Dataset Generation service, we collect large-scale datasets on a frequent basis using drones or autonomous robots. AI and data-driven solutions require extensive data, shifting the focus from limited feature engineering to acquiring large, balanced datasets of images and labels for training convolutional deep-learning networks. We offer flexible data collection options tailored to customer needs. We can use our systems and fields to gather data on crops under various conditions, such as different lighting, angles, growth stages, and soil types. Alternatively, we can use customer-provided devices to collect data for testing and validation, such as evaluating sensor performance in detecting heat in crops or testing robot navigation in crop fields.

Data Processing and Analysis

Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek (ILVO)

Location

Remote

Arable farming

Food processing

Greenhouse

Horticulture

Livestock farming

Tree Crops

Viticulture

This service transforms your raw agricultural data into valuable insights, enabling clear decision-making and optimised performance. The received data—whether from cameras, crop sensors, or other IoT devices—undergoes a thorough analysis to remove errors, inconsistencies, and outliers. Our pipeline prepares a balanced, high-quality, standardised dataset that complies with data standards, ensuring seamless sharing and interpretation. The dataset is tailored to the specific requirements of your project and delivers clean, organised data, ready for reporting, sharing, or further use in predictive models, trend analysis, or resource optimisation.

Evaluating autonomation readiness of agricultural robots

Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek (ILVO)

Location

At user's premises

Belgium

Arable farming

Horticulture

Tree Crops

Viticulture

Developing autonomous agricultural robots requires more than just solid mechanics—it needs reliable software to manage navigation, task execution, and communication between components. With this service, we offer a ready-to-use open-source robotic software framework to evaluate how your platform performs autonomous operations. By integrating your hardware with our system, you can verify the performance of your steering, sensors, and actuation systems under realistic agricultural scenarios. The framework supports a wide variety of robot types and drive configurations (e.g., Ackerman, skid-steer) and provides built-in modules for GNSS-guided navigation, task scheduling, and sensor interfacing. Additionally, it also allows the development of custom add-ons to test experimental features, innovative ideas, or validate new components.

Evaluation of Crop Protection Equipment

Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek (ILVO)

Location

Belgium

Arable farming

Greenhouse

Horticulture

Tree Crops

Viticulture

This service assesses the performance of advanced precision crop protection equipment, including map- and sensor-based precision spraying, non-chemical weed and disease control, and robotic applications. Evaluation is conducted both in controlled laboratory settings and real-world field conditions to assess and quantify efficacy, accuracy, and efficiency. The ILVO Spray Tech Lab, one of the world's few ISO 17025-accredited spray technology laboratories, specialises in characterising sprayers and spray nozzles. Additionally, we provide field testing for sensor-based precision spraying technologies and non-chemical solutions (e.g., mechanical, laser, and UV-based weed and disease control). For robotic applications, our robotic framework can be used, ensuring practical deployment feasibility in autonomous precision agriculture applications. The results help manufacturers and farmers optimise their equipment for more automated and effective crop protection tools.

Evaluation of sustainability of food processing through LCA

Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek (ILVO)

Location

At user's premises

Belgium

Remote

Food processing

Our service offers an AI-driven Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) to evaluate the sustainability of your food processing operations, utilising a combination of automated data collection and advanced analytics. By leveraging over 60 pilot-scale food processing technologies—ranging from traditional to cutting-edge methods—we quantify energy use, emissions, and resource efficiency. These insights enable companies to fine-tune ingredients, processing conditions, and operational settings to minimise their environmental impact while maintaining product quality and efficiency.

Interested in this service? Contact us at agrifoodtef@ilvo.vlaanderen.be 

Experimentation with validation tools for crop production and protection

Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM)

Location

Italy

Tree Crops

Viticulture

FEM will support companies developing machine vision tools (both hardware and software), e.g., for counting and estimating the size of fruits, either by collecting ground-truth data or by comparing the results of the FEM algorithms with the customer solution. These activities are supported by both physical and digital facilities.

Field Spectrometer Measurements

Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek (ILVO)

Location

At user's premises

Belgium

France

Germany

Netherlands

Arable farming

Food processing

Greenhouse

Horticulture

Livestock farming

Tree Crops

Viticulture

This service utilises field spectrometers to measure the spectral properties of physical environments, such as barns, greenhouses, or outdoor fields. By capturing detailed spectral data, we help you develop, improve, or validate your agri-food solutions, whether for monitoring plant health, optimising lighting conditions, or enhancing environmental control systems. The measurements provide insights into how different wavelengths of light interact with the environment, enabling fine-tuned adjustments for better crop growth, energy efficiency, or precision farming applications. Additionally, this service can serve as a follow-up to lab-scale measurements where hyperspectral technology is used to conduct pilot tests to determine which wavelengths provide valuable information. In this service, we then perform field tests on these specific wavelengths.

Hyperspectral and Spectrometer Testing for Agri-Food Product Quantification

Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek (ILVO)

Location

Belgium

Arable farming

Food processing

Greenhouse

Horticulture

Tree Crops

Viticulture

This service offers pilot testing of hyperspectral and spectrometer technologies to evaluate their potential for non-destructive, at- or inline analysis in agri-food processing. 

Using VIS and NIR hyperspectral cameras and spectrometers, we conduct lab-scale measurements to assess the feasibility of these technologies for your specific products or applications, such as quality control or process monitoring. Based on the collected data and reference samples, we build statistical and machine learning-based chemometric models to quantify key properties. 

Additionally, we offer resampling services to explore the integration of multispectral devices, whether existing or custom-built, into your production processes for optimized performance. 

Labelling and Data Augmentation Framework Support

Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek (ILVO)

Location

Remote

Arable farming

Food processing

Greenhouse

Horticulture

Livestock farming

Tree Crops

Viticulture

This service provides essential support for creating a robust framework to label, store, and manage data effectively for AI training purposes. Proper labelling is crucial, as deep learning models rely on consistent, high-quality data to detect complex patterns. Within this service, we do not label data ourselves but rather offer training guidelines to ensure that data is labelled accurately and consistently across large datasets. Please refer to other services if you wish for your data to be labelled by us. In addition, we help set up the necessary digital infrastructure for storing and maintaining this data. Our support streamlines the labelling and data augmentation process, laying the foundation for successful AI development in applications such as crop monitoring, pest detection, and yield prediction in the agri-food sector.

Livestock Dataset Generation

Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek (ILVO)

Location

Belgium

Livestock farming

This service supports the generation of high-quality datasets tailored for validating and improving AI-driven technologies or sensors designed for livestock management. Whether you are developing new tools for monitoring, controlling, or working with livestock, we help collect and process relevant data that reflects real-world conditions. These datasets enable you to fine-tune your AI models and sensor systems, ensuring they operate accurately and effectively. By leveraging this service, you can optimise your solutions for livestock health monitoring, behaviour analysis, and automated control systems in the agri-food sector.

Policy lab for innovative drone technologies in regulatory sandboxes

Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek (ILVO)

Location

Belgium

Arable farming

Greenhouse

Horticulture

Livestock farming

Tree Crops

Viticulture

This service is designed to support agri-food companies that want to test and evaluate the use of innovative drone technologies in a controlled environment—a so-called regulatory sandbox. Setting up such a drone sandbox requires navigating complex airspace regulations, flight safety rules, environmental constraints (e.g., drift, pesticide use), and data protection standards. Our experts help you design and prepare a sandbox operation from A to Z: from selecting a test location and identifying legal permissions needed to preparing risk assessments, notifying authorities, and ensuring safe operational procedures. We also offer advice on sensor integration, traceability, and aligning with EU drone and agricultural regulations such as Regulation EU 2019/947 on the operation of unmanned aircraft. This is an ideal service for companies wishing to run trials with crop spraying or precision seeding drones before launching commercially. - Set up a regulatory sandbox to safely and legally test spraying or seeding drones. - Understand the full list of permissions, safety protocols, and risk assessments required. - Learn how to engage with authorities (e.g., airspace regulators, pesticide control bodies). - Get support in preparing the documentation to operate drones legally during the test phase.