ROSCon UK 2026 Workshop
Thursday, 22 October 2026 | 14:30–18:00
Pentland East
About the Workshop
Agricultural robotics is rapidly adopting ROS, but development remains fragmented, limiting software reuse, interoperability and deployment. ROS in the Field: Building Open Agri-Food Robotics Together brings together researchers, ROS developers and industry practitioners to explore how shared open-source foundations can accelerate the development of agricultural robotics.
Anchored in the Innovate UK-funded Agri-OpenCore project, the workshop combines industry presentations, hands-on demonstrations and community discussion around real-world challenges including fleet management, autonomous navigation, teleoperation and field deployment.
The workshop aims to strengthen the emerging ROS agri-food robotics community, encourage open-source contributions and collaborations, and help establish a sustainable ecosystem of reusable ROS 2 technologies for robots operating in the field.
Programme
ROS in the Agri-Robotics Industry
14:30–15:00 | Fleet Management and Coordination with ROS and OpenRMF
Elliot Dixon, Roboverse
Practical approaches to fleet management and coordination using ROS and OpenRMF, with a focus on technologies and lessons relevant to real-world robotic deployments.
15:00–15:30 | ROS in Autonomous Crop Treatment in Horticulture
Jaime Pulido Fentanes, Saga Robotics
Experience from deploying robots in commercial horticultural environments, exploring the challenges of teleoperation and autonomous navigation outside controlled laboratory settings.
Agri-OpenCore: Building Shared ROS Foundations
15:30–16:00 | Agri-OpenCore: Reusable ROS Components for the Agri-Robotics Industry
Marc Hanheide, University of Lincoln
An introduction to the Innovate UK-funded Agri-OpenCore project and its vision for a shared ecosystem of open ROS 2 components for agricultural robotics. The session will present the motivation behind the initiative, current developments and opportunities for the wider ROS community to contribute.
16:00–16:30 | Coffee Break
16:30–17:15 | Agri-OpenCore Practical Demonstrations
A hands-on session showcasing selected Agri-OpenCore components. Participants will be able to explore Dockerised examples and learn how reusable components can be incorporated into their own ROS-based systems.
- Camera-LiDAR late fusion for 3D multi-object tracking using the AGHRI dataset, Prabuddhi Wariyapperuma, University of Lincoln
- Universal fruit detector component, training and deployment, Andrew Perrett, University of Lincoln
Shaping Future Field Robotics Challenges
17:15–18:00 | Field Robot Event 2027: Announcement and Community Discussion
Jonathan Cox and Emmanuel Soumo, University of Lincoln
Introduction to the Field Robot Event 2027, followed by an interactive discussion identifying relevant challenges for future agricultural robots. What capabilities should the next generation of field robots demonstrate? Which challenges could provide meaningful benchmarks for the community? This session invites participants to contribute ideas and help shape future competition tasks.
Who Should Attend?
The workshop is intended for:
- ROS practitioners – researchers, engineers and students interested in applying their expertise to agriculture;
- agri-food robotics researchers already developing ROS-based systems;
- industry developers building and deploying agricultural robots;
- ROS package maintainers and developers working in areas such as navigation, perception, manipulation, fleet management and human–robot interaction who are interested in the challenges of field deployment.
Participants should be familiar with basic ROS concepts, but no agricultural domain knowledge is required.
Why Participate?
The workshop provides an opportunity to learn from existing deployments, experiment with open-source components and contribute to defining common technical priorities for the community. Our longer-term ambition is to help create a collaborative ROS 2 ecosystem in which researchers and companies can reuse common foundations rather than repeatedly solving the same problems independently.
Practical Session – Participant Instructions
The practical session will feature Dockerised releases of selected Agri-OpenCore components, enabling participants to experiment with the software on their own laptops. Participants wishing to join the hands-on activities should bring a laptop. Detailed installation instructions, software requirements and links to the workshop materials will be published here closer to the workshop date.
Build It Together
This workshop is intended not only as a showcase, but as a starting point for a stronger open agri-food robotics community within ROS. If you develop ROS software, deploy robots in agriculture, maintain technologies that could be useful in the field, or simply want to explore a challenging new application area for robotics, we encourage you to join us, share your experience and help shape the open-source foundations for the next generation of agricultural robots.