Workshop details and materials: ROS in the Field: Building Open Agri-Food Robotics Together | Conference: ROSCon UK 2026

The UK’s ROS developer community is gathering in Edinburgh this week for ROSCon UK 2026, held from 21 to 23 October at the University of Edinburgh’s Pollock Estate Complex, and L-CAS is playing a central part. Our Director, Prof Marc Hanheide, is Programme Chair of the conference, and on Thursday 22 October the centre runs the workshop ROS in the Field: Building Open Agri-Food Robotics Together.

Shaping the programme

ROSCon UK is the annual developers’ conference for the UK’s Robot Operating System (ROS) community. Now in its second year, it is organised by the Tartan Robotics Collective in conjunction with the Open Source Robotics Foundation. As Programme Chair, Marc chaired the programme committee with Dr Hugo Sardinha (Launchpad Build), Mikel Bueno Viso (Cranfield University) and Dr Jelizaveta Konstantinova (Ocado Group), working alongside General Chair Dr Bence Magyar (Locus Robotics) and the wider organising committee. The result is three days of lab tours, birds-of-a-feather sessions, hands-on workshops, deep-dive sessions, keynotes, technical talks and lightning talks from across the UK ROS community.

ROS in the Field: open foundations for agri-food robotics

Agricultural robotics is adopting ROS fast, but development is still fragmented, which limits how much software can be reused, how well systems work together and how quickly robots reach real farms. Our workshop brings researchers, ROS developers and industry practitioners together to explore how shared open-source foundations can speed this up. It is anchored in the Innovate UK-funded Agri-OpenCore project, and runs from 14:30 to 18:00 in Pentland East.

• Fleet management and coordination with ROS and OpenRMF, Elliot Dixon, Roboverse Reply
• ROS in autonomous crop treatment in horticulture, Jaime Pulido Fentanes, Saga Robotics
• Agri-OpenCore: reusable ROS components for the agri-robotics industry, Prof Marc Hanheide, University of Lincoln
• Hands-on demonstrations of Agri-OpenCore components: camera-LiDAR late fusion for 3D multi-object tracking using the AGHRI dataset, Prabuddhi Wariyapperuma, and a universal fruit detector component, Andrew Perrett, both University of Lincoln
• Field Robot Event 2027: announcement and community discussion, Jonathan Cox and Emmanuel Soumo, University of Lincoln

The closing session looks ahead to the Field Robot Event 2027, which the University of Lincoln will host at its Riseholme Campus in June 2027. The Field Robot Event is a global, student-driven competition in which university teams design, build and test autonomous robots for real farming tasks. Jonathan and Emmanuel will introduce the event and then ask participants what the next generation of field robots should be able to demonstrate, and which challenges would make meaningful benchmarks for the community, to help shape future competition tasks. The FRE 2027 tasks are already online.

Try it yourself

You do not need to be in Edinburgh to get started. A small part of the Agri-OpenCore ecosystem, our topological navigation stack, is available as a Dockerised setup that runs in GitHub Codespaces or as a devcontainer. If you are at ROSCon UK, bring a laptop to Pentland East on Thursday afternoon and join us. Our longer-term aim is a collaborative ROS 2 ecosystem in which researchers and companies build on common foundations rather than solving the same problems again and again, and we would love you to help shape it.