Abstract

Innovation in agriculture is increasingly focusing on precision agriculture. The ultimate goal of precision agriculture is to use resources only when and where they are needed. Achieving this goal requires not only agronomic and technological advancements, but also the development of new quantitative methodologies for decision making. This need represents a potentially rich and stimulating research area for the control systems community. This talk begins with a brief overview of this general perspective, then focuses on a key aspect of a farm managements, i.e. Pest Control, presenting recent results on pest modelling, estimation, and control, and outlining key challenges and opportunities for future research.

Biography

Prof. Emanuele Garone received his PhD in Systems Engineering in 2009. He joined the Department of Automatic Control and Systems (SAAS) at the École Polytechnique de Bruxelles, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), in 2010, became Associate Professor in 2014, and has been Professor in the same department since 2022. He served as Program Director of the Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies for the 2024–2025 biennium on the theme “AI, Robotics, and Control as Enabler/Disabler of the UN Sustainable Development Goals”. He currently serves as Chair of the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Agriculture and Food Systems. The main research interests of Prof. Garone are constrained and distributed control. Besides theoretical research, he also made contributions to control applications in very diverse areas including drones, naval robots, robotic swarms, electric grids, and fast battery charging. His activity also includes bringing control ideas in new research areas such as agriculture and entomology, ecology, logistics, and epidemiology.