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title: 'About'
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# About us

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    ROMI is a four-year Europe-funded research project committed to promote a sustainable, local, and human-scale agriculture. The goal is to develop an open-source, affordable, multipurpose platform adapted to support organic and poly-culture market-garden farms.

    Small, diversified vegetable farms have an important role to play in sustainable food production. Installed close to cities, they provide healthy vegetables at accessible prices through short supply chains. They contribute to the biodiversity in peri-urban areas and re-establish the missing link between urban and rural areas.

    The Robotics for Microfarms project (ROMI) looks at the use of new technology, including robotics, AI, and advanced modeling, to assist these farms.

    The sizes of the farms that we are addressing are between 1000 m² and five hectares. These farms grow a large number of vegetables, up to a hundred varieties, every season. Because of this complexity, most of the planting out, weeding, and harvesting is performed manually. This work is quite physical and time consuming. The ROMI project looks at how new technologies can aid these farmers. The solutions must be adapted to the constraints imposed by these farms (small size, many different crops, lower investment capacity). The ROMI project therefore proposes technologies that are inexpensive, light-weight, and adaptable.

    We are looking both at concrete technologies for short-term applications as well as research for more long-term requirements. In the short term, we look at automatic weeding and crop monitoring for more precise crop planning. In the longer term, we deal with 3D imaging and modeling of individual plants for detailed plant health analysis and selective plant breeding. We also look into adative robotics so that our tools can deal gracefully with the complex, time-varying, in-field conditions.

    The ROMI technologies are available under an Open Source license in the hope of reaching as many microfarms as possible. We are currently targeting the European microfarms but we keep in mind that worldwide there are over 500 million small-holder farms that could benefit from our work.
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      ![The ROMI team celebrating the publication of the project.](/assets/about-team.jpg)
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      Have any questions or comments you'd like to share with us? Please feel free to reach out at [info@romi-project.eu](mailto:info@romi-project.eu).
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## ROMI Partners
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