Catalogue of Services

Digital testing of an AI solution often requires action to obtain the proper configuration. This service contains all the required actions necessary to configure, integrate and execute the client AI solution with FBK test environment. Carrying out these preliminary activities, FBK will be able to have a working setup that will be the entry point for subsequent testing and validation services.

Testing a system in a physical environment requires an environment that has been prepared and set up to support the specific testing activities to be executed. Such an environment usually involves both agronomy-related elements (machines, fields, greenhouses, cultivations...) and technical infrastructure (sensors, networks, software, logging systems...). In order to execute the testing, the physical system under test (e.g., an agricultural robot) must correctly interface with all these elements; this service takes care of ensuring this.

For instance, it is crucial to ensure that the communication between the system under test and the technical infrastructure supporting the testing activities is correct, smooth and uninterrupted.

Wherever needed, the service also includes the development of custom components needed to ensure a successful two-way integration between the system and the testing infrastructure (e.g., a software component to format data or perform transcoding).

While available separately, this service is often used in association with service S00110 (Preparation of physical test environment).

Digital testing requires interaction among several different components which have to reliably cooperate to enable the testing activities and to ensure that their outcomes reliably reflect the system’s capabilities. When digital testing of customer systems leverages agrifoodTEF’s computational infrastructure, integration between the infrastructure and the systems to be tested is needed before the tests/experiments can be executed. If the customer does not possess the technical expertise – or does not want to devote resources – to perform the integration, this service can support them in the process. Help is provided by a team of expert engineers.

This service concerns the integration of the customers’ system and/or data used for testing with the agrifoodTEF digital testing infrastructure. In particular, integration is crucial to ensure smooth and uninterrupted communication between the system and the infrastructure that produces, collects and/or processes test data.

This service also includes the development of any custom components needed to ensure a two-way integration between the system and the reference infrastructure (e.g., software components to format data or to perform transcoding).

The purpose of this service is to provide advanced testing for AI and navigation software in the agrifood sector. By leveraging AI-powered test case generation, the service aims to create enriched and realistic testing scenarios that address safety and performance challenges in the control systems of complex agricultural systems. It seeks to support companies in identifying performance issues, allowing them to optimise system efficiency and reliability, with the objective of reducing costs and improving overall system performance.

Testing of AI and robotics solutions leveraging edge computing and communication protocols in the IoT cloud-edge continuum. Can be a digital test (run on virtualised machines) or a physical test deployed either at the customer's premises or using the wide coverage wireless network installed in Trento valleys (Val d'Adige and Val di Non) for fruit crops (including but not limited to apples and grapes). FBK can support test design, proposing a benchmarking architecture to stress and monitor key components, helping to understand bottlenecks, allowing for better performance, lower bandwidth use, more reliability, and lower operating costs of tested solutions.

Agriculture is a local and specific business, where localisation of solutions is required, especially when it comes to language and interfacing with users. Albeit the diffusion of multilingual generative AI technologies (or large language models, e.g., GPT), these models are not optimised for a specific industry. We can test the performance of multilingual AI solutions in agriculture, highlighting bottlenecks that limit them. This allows for optimised localisation of solutions and quicker achievement of scalability at the European level.

Solutions in the agricultural sector that use weather forecasts can suffer from inaccuracies of standard weather service APIs, such as lack of granularity, no usage of in-field sensors, and low precision of generic models. Using FBK's expertise in advanced weather forecasting, we are capable of testing weather-related functionalities in solutions and proposing ways forward to take it to the next level: nowcasting, higher resolution, model optimisation for specific regions, etc.

Analysis of collected data in the context of AI agriculture product or service development and opportunities for data-value extraction via integration within the AgrifoodTEF DataSpace. We can help customers understand the value of their data (monetary and not monetary) and channels to offer it to potential users/buyers. By analysing the offer and demand in relevant Data Spaces, we suggest the optimal way to describe metadata and adopt the right technology implementations to make data visible, ensuring data owners never lose control of who accesses their data. The services include consulting customers on the enrichment of their data system to adopt data sovereignty and trust solutions that make them contribute to and be part of the European data space strategy.