The VINUM project seeks to address the shortage of skilled labor in modern vineyards by introducing a cutting-edge mobile robotic solution. Leveraging the capabilities of the quadruped robot, HyQReal, this system, equipped with arm and vision sensors, offers autonomous navigation and winter pruning of grapevines reducing the need for human intervention. At the heart of this approach lies an architecture that empowers the robot to easily navigate vineyards, identify grapevines with unparalleled accuracy, and approach them for pruning with precision. A state machine drives the process, deftly switching between various stages to ensure seamless and efficient task completion. The system's performance was assessed through experimentation, focusing on waypoint precision and optimizing the robot's workspace for single-plant operations. Results indicate that the architecture is highly reliable, with a mean error of 21.5cm and a standard deviation of 17.6cm for HyQReal. However, improvements in grapevine detection accuracy are necessary for optimal performance. This work is based on a computer-vision-based navigation method for quadruped robots in vineyards, opening up new possibilities for selective task automation. The system's architecture works well in ideal weather conditions, generating and arriving at precise waypoints that maximize the attached robotic arm's workspace. This work is an extension of our short paper presented at the Italian Conference on Robotics and Intelligent Machines (I-RIM).

There is a dramatic shortage of skilled labor for modern vineyards. The Vinum project is developing a mobile robotic solution to autonomously navigate through vineyards for winter grapevine pruning. This necessitates an autonomous navigation stack for the robot pruning a vineyard. The Vinum project is using the quadruped robot HyQReal. This paper introduces an architecture for a quadruped robot to autonomously move through a vineyard by identifying and approaching grapevines for pruning. The higher level control is a state machine switching between searching for destination positions, autonomously navigating towards those locations, and stopping for the robot to complete a task. The destination points are determined by identifying grapevine trunks using instance segmentation from a Mask Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask-RCNN). These detections are sent through a filter to avoid redundancy and remove noisy detections. The combination of these features is the basis for the proposed architecture.

More organizations are adopting artificial intelligence (AI). Fourteen percent of global CIOs have already deployed AI and 48% will deploy it in 2019 or by 2020, according to Gartner's 2019 CIO Agenda survey. "While adoption is increasing, some organizations are still questioning the business impact and benefits. Today, we witness three barriers to the adoption of AI," says Brian Manusama, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner.

In recent years, multi-agent epistemic planning has received attention from both dynamic logic and planning communities. Existing implementations of multi-agent epistemic planning are based on compilation into classical planning and suffer from various limitations, such as generating only linear plans, restriction to public actions, and incapability to handle disjunctive beliefs. In this paper, we propose a general representation language for multi-agent epistemic planning where the initial KB and the goal, the preconditions and effects of actions can be arbitrary multi-agent epistemic formulas, and the solution is an action tree branching on sensing results. To support efficient reasoning in the multi-agent KD45 logic, we make use of a normal form called alternating cover disjunctive formulas (ACDFs). We propose basic revision and update algorithms for ACDFs. We also handle static propositional common knowledge, which we call constraints. Based on our reasoning, revision and update algorithms, adapting the PrAO algorithm for contingent planning from the literature, we implemented a multi-agent epistemic planner called MEPK. Our experimental results show the viability of our approach.

In recent years, the AI boom has taken an incredibly large role in the marketing world. A survey conducted by MemSQL, a provider of the real-time data warehousing, found that 61% of marketers claim that AI is their most significant data initiative for the coming year. Respondents were from both small and large companies. Regarding content strategy, the insights provided by AI can do wonders to create messaging that resonates with the right people, in the right place, at the right time. Let's talk about several ways you can use it to do so.