Building trustworthy autonomous robots for agricultural and environmental applications — from multi-robot field navigation and people localisation to precision farming and animal welfare monitoring.
Summary
Agriculture and environmental monitoring are domains where autonomous robots can have a profound real-world impact. This strand of research focuses on making robots reliable, trustworthy, and useful in unstructured outdoor environments. This includes multi-robot topological navigation for soft-fruit farms, human localisation and prediction in the field, explainable robot behaviours for agricultural operators, and monitoring systems for animal welfare. A thread running through all of this is robustness: robots that fail gracefully, communicate their limitations, and remain useful in the long run.
Videos
Projects
Autonomous Robotics for Animal Welfare and Environmental Monitoring, Funded by BBSRC FoodBioSystems DTP (PI: Dr Francesco Del Duchetto). University of Lincoln. 2026-2030.
Trustworthy and Explainable Robots for Agricultural Applications, Funded by Douglas Bomford Trust & EPSRC AgriForwards CDT (PI: Dr Francesco Del Duchetto). University of Lincoln. 2025-2027.
ProPick: Using eye-tracking and AI to enhance the Performance Of fruit Pickers, Funded by EPSRC LINCAM AgriTech Cluster (Co-PI: Dr Francesco Del Duchetto). 2025.
Navigate-and-Seek: People Localisation in Agricultural Environments, In collaboration with Saga Robotics & L-CAS, University of Lincoln. Link: doi:10.1109/lra.2021.3094557
References
2026
Automated video analysis for wearable eye tracking devices: a strawberry harvesting use case
Alex Perrett, Francesco Del Duchetto, Sam Willmott, and 4 more authors
@inproceedings{perrett2026automated,title={Automated video analysis for wearable eye tracking devices: a strawberry harvesting use case},author={Perrett, Alex and Del Duchetto, Francesco and Willmott, Sam and Hodgson, Tim and Grant, Justin and Manning, Louise and Guevara, Leonardo},booktitle={Innovative Agricultural Technologies},pages={169--185},year={2026},publisher={Springer Nature Switzerland},}
2025
A Retrieval Augmented Generation Approach for Planning on General Purpose Service Robots
Emily Attenborough, Hari Arunachalam, Juan Pablo Vasconez, and 3 more authors
In International Conference on Advanced Research in Technologies, Information, Innovation and Sustainability (ARTIIS), 2025
@inproceedings{attenborough2025rag,title={A Retrieval Augmented Generation Approach for Planning on General Purpose Service Robots},author={Attenborough, Emily and Arunachalam, Hari and Vasconez, Juan Pablo and Del Duchetto, Francesco and Polvara, Riccardo and Guevara, Leonardo},booktitle={International Conference on Advanced Research in Technologies, Information, Innovation and Sustainability (ARTIIS)},year={2025},}
@article{das2024unified,title={A unified topological representation for robotic fleets in agricultural applications},author={Das, Gautham and Cielniak, Grzegorz and Heselden, James and Pearson, Simon and Del Duchetto, Francesco and Zhu, Zuyuan and Dichtl, Johann and Hanheide, Marc and Fentanes, Jaime Pulido and Binch, Adam and others},journal={Journal of Field Robotics},volume={42},number={3},pages={760--786},year={2024},publisher={Wiley Online Library},}
2023
In-the-Wild Failures in a Long-Term HRI Deployment
Francesco Del Duchetto, Ayse Kucukyilmaz, Marc Hanheide, and 1 more author
In Workshop on Robot Execution Failures and Failure Management Strategies at ICRA 2023, 2023
@inproceedings{del2023wild,title={In-the-Wild Failures in a Long-Term HRI Deployment},author={Del Duchetto, Francesco and Kucukyilmaz, Ayse and Hanheide, Marc and others},booktitle={Workshop on Robot Execution Failures and Failure Management Strategies at ICRA 2023},year={2023},}
@article{polvara2021navigate,title={Navigate-and-seek: a robotics framework for people localization in agricultural environments},author={Polvara, Riccardo and Del Duchetto, Francesco and Neumann, Gerhard and Hanheide, Marc},journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},volume={6},number={4},pages={6577--6584},year={2021},publisher={IEEE},}