IROS 2025 Keynotes - Field Robotics: Matteo Matteucci

Original Description

"Keynote Title: ""Robotics Meets Agriculture: SLAM and Perception for Crop Monitoring and Precision Farming""

Speaker Biography

Matteo Matteucci is Full Professor at Dipartimento di Elettronica Informazione e Bioingegneria of Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His main research topics are pattern recognition, machine learning, machine perception, robotics, computer vision and signal processing. His main research interest is in developing, evaluating and applying, in a practical way, techniques for adaptation and learning to autonomous systems interacting with the physical world. He has co-authored more than 150 scientific international publications and he has been the principal investigator in national and international funded research projects on machine learning, autonomous robots, sensor fusion, and benchmarking of autonomous and intelligent systems.

Abstract

The growing demand for food, combined with labor shortages and the need for sustainable practices, is driving a profound transformation in agriculture. Under the banner of Agriculture 4.0, digital technologies, automation, and data-driven decision-making are reshaping the way we produce food. The integration of robotics into agriculture is foreseen as a key enabler of this shift, offering new ways to monitor, manage, and optimize farming systems. This talk explores recent advances in perception for agricultural robotics, with a focus on how SLAM and vision-based methods support crop monitoring and precision farming practices. I will discuss key challenges such as dealing with unstructured environments, seasonal variability, and plant occlusions, and highlight opportunities for combining multi-modal sensing."