Robotic systems play a major role for realizing the vision of sustainable crop production. While Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used to monitor the health status of agricultural fields using sensors like RGB cameras, multi-spectral cameras, and LiDAR, it is often still necessary to literally walk into the field to do close-up inspections of individual plants or even leaves for the detection of diseases or nutrient deficiencies in early stages of plant growth. 

Agriculture today faces significant challenges that require new ways of thinking, such as smart digital technologies that enable innovative approaches. However, research gaps limit their potential to improve agriculture.

One of PhenoRob's aims is to translate research into practice. Pheno-Inspect GmbH is a 2020 start up, with a strong connection to PhenoRob, working on how to interpret image-data recorded in agricultural fields and from there on out build smart AI systems to do the same to and provide services in the agricultural industry.

The consumption of milk products, eggs and fish has a positive effect on childhood development in Africa. This has been demonstrated in a recent study by the CABI's regional centre for Africa in Nairobi, Kenya and the University of Bonn. The researchers used representative data from five African countries with over 32,000 child observations. If the children had a diet containing animal products, they suffered less from malnutrition and related developmental deficiencies. The study has now been published in the journal PNAS.

Rainforest protection is not only good for biodiversity and the climate – it also noticeably improves the health of humans who live in the corresponding regions. This is the conclusion drawn by a current study by the University of Bonn and the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. In this, the researchers show that measures to combat slash-and-burn techniques significantly reduce the concentration of particulate matter in the air. The number of hospital stays and deaths due to respiratory diseases thus also decreases. The results have been published now in the journal Nature Communications, Earth & Environment.

IROS 2024 Best Agri-Robotics Paper Award for the PhenoRob paper "BonnBeetClouds3D: A Dataset Towards Point Cloud-Based Organ-Level Phenotyping of Sugar Beet Plants Under Real Field Conditions" presented by Elias Marks and finalist for the IROS 2024 Best Agri-Robotics Paper Award for the PhenoRob paper "Spatio-Temporal Consistent Mapping of Growing Plants for Agricultural Robots in the Wild" presented by Luca Lobefaro at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) in Abu Dhabi.

The University of Bonn has once again demonstrated its excellence as a research institution in the latest Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2024—part of the high-profile Shanghai Ranking. Mathematics and Economics held on to their respective first-place rankings in Germany, enjoyed for several years now. Agricultural Sciences now ranks third nationally.

University of Bonn’s Institute for Geodesy and Geoinformation (IGG) joins global efforts in advancing Geodesy as a Partner of the United Nations Geodetic Centre of Excellence (UN-GGCE) in Bonn.