Meet Our Partner

Since its opening by Her Majesty the Queen in 1996, the University of Lincoln (UL) has enjoyed a meteoric rise up the university league tables and has established an international reputation for the quality of its research and teaching. The share of national research funding awarded to the University of Lincoln has recently doubled following a major review of research standards across the UK’s universities (Research Excellence Framework 2014). This is one of the largest increases in the UK higher education sector. Within the University’s College of Science, Lincoln was placed second out of 29 institutions across the UK for the quality of its research outputs in the subject area of Agriculture, Veterinary and Food Science. Two research centres within the LIAT are participating in BACCHUS, namely the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems Research (L-CAS) and the Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology (LIAT)

Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology (LIAT) which brings together the University’s growing research and educational activity in the agri-tech and food sectors, including food manufacturing, agri-robotics, agronomy and animal science.

Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems Research (L-CAS), led by Prof. Tom Duckett, pursues several lines of fundamental research into autonomous systems, including human-centred mobile robotics, long-term autonomy and adaptation in changing environments, and machine perception and sensor fusion. The Centre specialises in systems integration, bringing together these technologies to tackle challenging real-world applications in agriculture and food manufacturing, security, assistive care, and intelligent transportation. L-CAS’s international collaborations include the EU-funded projects FLOBOT (H2020 IA, 645376), ENRICHME (H2020 RIA, 643691), STRANDS (FP7 IP, 600623), HAZCEPT (FP7 IRSES, 318907), LIVCODE (FP7 IRSES, 295151) and EYE2E (FP7 IRSES, 269118). L-CAS has also established strong links with the UK’s local and national food industry through collaboration on a number of UK funded projects, including work on 3D vision assisted harvesting of broccoli, autonomous control of agricultural spraying vehicles, and trainable vision systems for automating quality control of food products (IUK131289, IUK131442, IUK101252). Currently, 3 full Professors, 7 additional senior faculty members, and more than 20 post-doctoral research fellows and post-graduate research students contribute to L-CAS’s research output.