We are pleased to announce that Dr. El Houssein Chouaib Harik will be speaking at NSYP19 giving a talk entitled “Reduced GHG-emissions through electrification of agriculture”.

Dr. El Houssein Chouaib Harik received his PhD degree in computer science in 2016 from Normandie University Le Havre in France. His field of expertise covers the development of robotic solutions that can be used for different purposes. His focus lies on hardware architecture and embedded systems integration, in addition to the establishment of control laws for decision and autonomous navigation.

He is currently working on the development of agricultural robotic solutions as postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Precision Agriculture (https://precisionag.no/) that belongs to the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy (NIBIO).

In this presentation we deal with the ongoing research at the Center for Precision Agriculture aimed at reducing the use of fossil fuel in agriculture. We address a concept of innovative technical solutions and methodologies applicable at farm level.

The idea consists in utilizing available roof area on farm buildings for solar energy capture, and to use this energy along with state-of-the-art precision agriculture technologies to produce food and feed in a more sustainable manner.

The concept opens for a system change in farm machinery composition, moving from one or two large and heavy diesel tractors, to a few and partly unmanned electrical tractors.

A management shift into smaller and lighter tractors will require more vehicles to perform the same job as the original, large tractor, but such a shift should not increase the need for labor (i.e. for driving). At this talk we will present our fleet management system alongside some experimental results.