European agriculture is facing numerous challenges such as population growth, climate change, resource shortages or increased competition. Besides, the area of land available for agriculture is declining, rural areas become depopulated and farming population is aging. Today’s challenge is to produce “more with less”. Greenhouses protect crops from adverse weather conditions allowing year-round production. Integrated crop management approaches provide better control over pests and diseases. However, the intensification of greenhouse crop production creates favorable conditions for devastating infestation that can cost a 25% of the potential income. Greenhouse crop production is growing throughout the world, generating 46,377€/ha across Europe. GreenPatrol aims at developing an innovative and efficient robotic solution for Integrated Pest Management in crops, which has the ability to navigate inside greenhouses while performing early pest detection and control tasks in an autonomous way. Main developments will be focused on: - Precise positioning to provide accurate and detailed pest maps in greenhouses (light indoor environments) - Perception with visual sensing for on-line pest detection, including reasoning mechanisms for efficient action selection - Strategies for manipulation and motion planning based on pest monitoring feedback. Galileo capabilities are considered a fundamental technology for the proposed solution as it provides better performance against the multipath and signal degradation present in greenhouses. GreenPatrol will achieve a remarkable reduction of production losses and chemicals usage, as well as an increase in quality and competitiveness, leading to more sustainable farming and enhanced food safety and soil and water protection. The project includes a validation stage where the prototype will be tested in real environment to reach TRL7. GreenPatrol will be commercially exploited. Its business plan shows profits starting in year 3.

Only in Europe 3,6 million tonnes of feathers are generated per year as waste of the poultry sector. Around 25% is used for animal feed or fertilisers while the rest is disposed in landfills or incinerated. Feathers contain nearly 90% of keratin, a valuable protein which can source for biodegradable materials, such as bioplastics for agriculture. However, to unlock the full potential of feathers as raw material for functional molecules, there are many technical, logistic and market hurdles to solve in the supply chain for the takeoff of profitable value chains and for the easy market uptake of keratin-based products. UNLOCK will design and demonstrate economically & environmentally sustainable value chains led by the primary sector, which will generate innovative bio-based functional products for agricultural applications: forest/seed trays, nonwoven geotextiles, mulch films and hydroponic foams. Keratin-based materials will outperform their fossil-based counter parts by providing additional functionalities during the product life span and environmental benefits at the end-of-life (controlled biodegradability, enrichment of organic nitrogen to soil and zero waste generation). UNLOCK will create 4 new bio-based value chains, 4 new agricultural consumer goods and at least 3 cross sector interconnections among the primary sector (poultry sector), the bioplastics industry and the agricultural sector, opening up new innovation-led market and job opportunities in the EU bioeconomy. UNLOCK conversion technologies will evolve from TRL5 to 7, demonstrating the full potential of keratin for circular bio-based plastics, through a multidisciplinary consortium of 15 partners (8 SMEs), supported by a strong stakeholder board. UNLOCK will enable the setup of 2 first-of-its-kind commercial biorefineries after the end of the project. The co-creation and replication will be reinforced through a specific regional cluster approach to multiply the impacts during and after the project.

In 2001, EU countries committed themselves to halt biodiversity decline by 2010, and to evaluate this target. As such, a number of international conventions requiring bird populations to be monitored are actually in force. Traditional birds’ ringing -using metallic rings- implies identifying the animal at one site and then recapturing it at a different site or in a different moment which provides spatial, temporal, physiological and behavioural information of individuals (mark-recapture techniques). INKOA has developed e-BIRDS System, which consists of a robust system to automatically and unequivocally identify bird individuals on the basis of radio frequency identification (RFID). The e-BIRDS System comprises (1) a bird feeders network with integrated RFID reader and antenna, (2) system architecture for wireless data collection and (3) user friendly interface for the individual identification of birds. e-BIRDS System can be deployed in unlimited areas of interest and throughout the complete life time of the animal. e-BIRDS is a completely unattended system (no need to manually collect data or to charge or replace batteries) for long term data acquisition on birds’ population dynamics. The innovation entails substantial savings in fields’ work for professional ornithologists and establishes the pathway for collaborative science for domestic consumers. Furthermore, it implies no need to manipulate animals beyond the initial tagging (paradigm change from mark-recapture to mark-automatic identification). No similar product currently exists on the market. e-BIRDS contributes to biodiversity halting and early establishment of environmental protection measures. The Objective of the overall innovation project is to scale up, industrialise, validate on a complete value chain and bring to market readiness and maturity the e-BIRDS system for market take-up. The innovation project aims as well to define a sound marketing and commercialization strategy.