Recently, LCASTOR, our robotics competition team, went to Bernburg, Germany, to compete in the 23rd Annual Field Robot Event (FRE) (June 2026). Organised by the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück and the Technical University of Braunschweig, this competition brought together 16 university teams from 10 different countries across Europe, Turkey, and China, all competing in agri-robotics tasks.

The Field Robot Event is a fantastic platform for showcasing innovation in agricultural robotics, with challenging tasks such as crop row navigation, fruit and mushroom detection, and a freestyle challenge. The competition was organised in association with the German Agricultural Society (DLG) and hosted at their exhibition DLG Feldtage 2026, which attracted thousands of visitors and exhibitors across three days, many of whom visited the competition and observed the competing teams.

FRE is a fantastic platform for showcasing innovation in agricultural robotics, with challenging tasks such as crop row navigation, insect detection, precision spraying, and a freestyle challenge.

Our team, comprising of Postdoc Researchers, PhD, MSc, and BSc Robotics, Computer Science and Engineering students, using LCAS research in crop row navigation, insect detection, and manipulation to pick strawberries, using an Agilex Ranger Mini V2 robot equipped with an array of sensors.

Six of our team members made the journey to Germany: Dr Rajitha De Silva, Dr Jonathan Cox, Elliot Smith, Emmanuel Soumo, Amy-Rose Masic, and Yasmin Alderson. They were supported by a remote team back at the university, including Abdulhaleem Oseni, Charlie Parker, Ransome Michael, Dr Rob Lloyd, and Josh Cooper.

On the first day, the tasks consisted of the robots navigating autonomously around a maize field. Our robot used a lidar and current experimental research to detect the rows of plants and navigate along the rows. Out of the sixteen teams, ours finished joint eighth.

The second task was a similar challenge in navigating along curved maize rows and detecting “diseased plants” in the rows, represented by jute and yellow flags. Here, our team employed the same navigation method as the first task and, using RGB-D cameras mounted on the robot’s sides, used an object detection model to find the diseased plants. Our robot detected some of the flags, finishing joint fifth.

The second day’s challenges were insect detection and precision spraying. In the third task, our team used a similar object detection model to detect three insects: bees, butterflies, and ladybirds. These were placed in the rows, and the robot detected some of the insects but also made a few false detections, finishing thirteenth.

The final day of the competition was the freestyle task, where the teams can demonstrate their creativity with an agricultural application of their choice related to a topic. This year’s topics was sustainability, water saving, energy efficiency, biodiversity support, or reduced chemical input. For this task our team were inspired by the research LCAS is conducting on using robots in strawberry harvesting and used a robot arm to pick strawberries. The robot arm was attached to the robot which could be teleoperated from the edge of the arena. Yasmin presented the work, written by Amy-Rose, to the judges and audience. After all of the teams had presented, the judges and team captains voted on the best team’s solution. Here, the team finished second, with the judges commenting that they liked the robot arm solution and how relevant it was to the industry and the topic of sustainability.

This was the team’s second time attending the competition; LCAS are incredibly proud of the team, improving on last year’s event, not only scoring points but winning a trophy for second place in the freestyle task in such a competitive environment is a great achievement. The event was a great experience in which our team met a lot of new friends and learnt a lot of interesting new things, which we hope to take and apply to both next year’s competition and our research.

We would like to thank our supporters this year, the Douglas Bomford Trust and the AgriFoRwArdS CDT.

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