Production of 58% and exportation of 2/3 of the volume of wine in the world come from Europe, led by its three cadors France, Spain and Italy. Europe is the first producer and first world exporter in a sector which constitutes the first agricultural sector in the European Union.
This sector is therefore an economic pillar for Europe, especially since world wine trade reached 26 billion euros in 2014.
However, although still leader in this market, the European continent has seen its share decrease over the years (representing in the 90s almost 80% of exported wine).
But this trend may soon be reversed by the arrival in four years of an actor who could not only increase the quantity of production, but also improve its quality: it is a robot named VINBOT, designed to increase the competitiveness of European winegrowers.
 
VINBOT, THE WINEGROWER ROBOT.

VINBOT is an off-road autonomous mobile robot that responds to the need to improve the quality of wine in Europe and also to increase the quantity of production. It evaluates the behavior of each plant, including the quality and quantity of the grapes and thus estimates the future yield of the vineyard with a margin of error between 10 to 15%, it is called “precision viticulture”.
These estimations help winegrowers to better manage production, knowing which part of the vineyard should be harvested and when, and then plan the commercialization.
This robot therefore appears as a substitution or an addition to the estimation made visually on samples that is lacking precision. And it should be noted that this inaccurate estimation is causing several losses each year for winegrowers.
 
VINBOT circulates self-governing in the vineyards.
Able to climb slopes of 45 ° and equipped with a detection system, it uses a camera that takes several pictures of the plants. Then, these pictures are uploaded to a server in the cloud and processed, allowing to identify grapes and their condition (quality, quantity, early maturity or delayed …) in a part of the vineyard.
VINBOT can circulate through hundreds of hectares several times a year and with autonomy thanks to its artificial intelligence. The initial limits, however, are defined by a human with the application on his smartphone, monitoring the robot from one site to another.