All over Europe, young farmers are starting small market farms. These farms can be found both in rural, peri-urban and urban areas. They grow a large variety of crops (up to 100 different varieties of vegetables per year) on small surfaces (0.01 to 5 ha) using organic farming practices. These farms have proven to be highly productive, sustainable and economically viable. But, a lot of work is done manually, resulting in physically challenging work conditions. ROMI will develop an open and lightweight robotics platform for these microfarms. We will assist these farms in weed reduction and crop monitoring. This will reduce manual labour and increase the productivity. Thanks to ROMI’s weeding robot, farmers will save 25% of their time. This land robot will also acquire detailed information on sample plants and will be coupled with a drone that acquires more global information at crop level. Together, they will produce an integrated, multi-scale picture of the crop development that will help the farmer monitor the crops to increase efficient harvesting. For this, ROMI will have to adapt and extend state-of-the-art land-based and air-borne monitoring tools to handle small fields with complex layouts and mixed crops. To achieve this, we will: (i) develop and bring to the market an affordable, multi-purpose, land-based robot, (ii) develop a weeding app for this robot that is adapted for organic microfarms, (iii) apply advanced 3D plant analysis and modelling techniques to in-field data acquisition, (iv) integrate these analysis techniques in the robot for detailed plant monitoring, (iv) integrate these techniques also in the aerial drone N-E-R-O for multi-scale crop monitoring, (v) extend the robot with novel, adaptive learning techniques to improve sensorimotor control of the plant monitoring app, and (vii) test the effectiveness of our solution in real-world field conditions. A spin-off will be created to bring the robot and the drone to the market of micro-farms.

SERENA will accelerate efforts to improve access to health and social care (HSC) for child victims of maltreatment (physical, sexual, psychological abuse and neglect) throughout Europe. The major ambition of SERENA is to identify and promote the means of improving the detection of child maltreatment (CM), of limiting its consequences (recurrence, severe conditions), and reducing the induced burden for victims, families, and society. This ambition will be supported by assessments of current care pathways (HSC services), the barriers and inequalities when accessing these services (before and after the recognition of CM, including children's physical and mental health conditions), as well as the financial burden on a societal level. Our assessments will rely on a mixed-method approach combining qualitative analyses in 3 EU countries (interviews with adult survivors of CM (ASCM) and HSC professionals) and quantitative analyses (longitudinal cohort study based on HSC administrative data in 7 countries, but also aggregated CPS data in 26 countries). An interdisciplinary participatory synthesis of the findings (with stakeholders and ASCM) will deliver a co-constructed assessment of the situation and the definition of priority actions. Finally, we will design and promote, through the consortium's extensive network, operationally and economically viable recommendations with potential for transposability across the EU for policy makers and HSC services. The SERENA recommendations will encourage changes in policies in all EU member states so that HSC daily practice can i) be assessed in terms of validity and availability of the services in all areas, ii) identify necessary evolutions to be encouraged through legislative measures (data collection and exchange between HSC services), and iii) provide an awaited shift in CM management. The resulting effects of these changes will include improved detection of CM cases and HSC access, improved management and reduced overall costs.