Symposium 2025: Agritech

Facing uncertainty

Weather, timeframes, and reliability

Agriculture has always been dependent on nature, but today’s farmers face unprecedented challenges: shorter time windows to work on the fields, unpredictable weather, and higher demands on output. Machines must operate with unparalleled reliability during these critical moments and harsh conditions, with even less room for any downtime.

To meet this need, technology is stepping in with predictive maintenance and anomaly detection. With vision-assisted condition monitoring in gearboxes, we can identify problems before they cause a breakdown, both in farming machinery and in food production lines. And when something does go wrong, we don’t need to rely solely on one seasoned operator’s expertise.

With expert knowledge capture and reuse, entire organizations’ insights can be leveraged instantly, ensuring quick support in the field without dependency on scarce human expertise. Or we can take it one step further, connecting expert knowledge with live data (for example weather forecasts) to make context-based predictions for production.

Feeding the world

Productivity amid labour shortages

Global food consumption is increasing while skilled labour in agriculture is becoming scarce and costly. The key is to maximize output per operator and free up valuable time for higher-level decision-making.

Robotisation and automation are central here. Demonstrators like multiple hypothesis tracking for robot navigation enable field robots to keep working, even if connections fail.

While complex manoeuvre control in agriculture (VR demo) shows how machines can gradually evolve from operator support to fully autonomous operations. These advances will lead to smaller, autonomous machines that can handle precision farming of crops with a smaller footprint on the soil.

In unstructured environments, where crops differ in size, shape, or fragility, we see robots equipped for precision gripping and using vision AI-based technologies for crop recognition.

From robot-aided scaffold assembly to the smart electromagnetic gripper for delicate materials, these technologies showcase how robotic grippers can be adapted to specific tasks. Specific grippers for manipulating vegetables, fruits or processed food are already part of our research, boosting productivity while reducing human workload on farms or processing facilities.

From field to factory

Timing and quality in food production

With changing climates, optimal harvesting windows are shorter and less predictable. Precision in timing is crucial: planting, harvesting, and processing must happen at the right moment, in order to guarantee consistent quality at competitive costs. In addition, processing a high mix of products requires flexibility in planning dealing with change-over times and cleaning procedures.

AI-driven planning and scheduling tools are stepping in, helping farmers and processors make the right choices at the right time. Digital tools like the digital twin of a continuous manufacturing process enable faster decision-making while optimizing energy use.

Quality control is also evolving. From process quality tracking and correction with machine vision to defect detection without manual annotation, these solutions reduce reliance on human inspection while maintaining consistent standards.

At the same time, root cause analysis is accelerated by combining expert knowledge (pFMEA) with real-time factory data, closing the loop in continuous improvement. Together, these technologies ensure not only higher yields but also more sustainable practices and stable, reliable food quality across the value chain.

Towards clean and resilient energy

Sustainability is no longer optional. Like any other sector, the agricultural sector is pushed to embrace electrification, in order to reduce fossil fuel dependency and CO₂ emissions.

Demonstrators such as the novel concept for electrical excitation of the rotor in synchronous machines show how local, sustainable solutions can reduce reliance on rare materials often mined abroad.

In parallel, the Energy Management System for Hybrid Energy Storage Systems demonstrates how fewer batteries can deliver the same performance, cutting costs while extending lifetime.

Together, these innovations pave the way for resilient, eco-friendly agricultural machinery. But even in production lines electrification is on the rise. This trend helps reduce reliance on hydraulic systems, while smart EMS systems reduce energy costs by better utilizing renewable energy and dynamic electricity prices.