Between 11-12 May 2023, Athens and, more specifically, the Agricultural University of Athens became the meeting point for researchers, technology providers, producers, farmers and policymakers in the agri-food industry. In the name of sustainability and innovation, the "Unlocking the Power of Robotics in Agri-Food” networking event organised by agROBOfood was a milestone in promoting robotics and digitalisation to bring about a brighter future.

Due to the COVID pandemic, the international exhibition’s 36th edition is coming to Den Bosch, Netherlands, four years after its usual rendez vous, between May 10-12. In 2019, the tri-annual event hosted 115 exhibitors worldwide that presented products, services and technologies. The attendance was also overwhelmingly positive, with 3.282 visitors visiting from 83 countries, so expectations for the first post-covid exhibition amidst the shroom boom are high.

Our SoftGrip team is continuing its efforts to spread the project mission like our latest journey to Pakistan. This time, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna participated in the 6th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft) held between April 3-7 in Singapore. This year’s conference aimed to dive deeper into soft robotics for sustainable development in multiple fields, from healthcare and agriculture to industrialisation and cities.

The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) and its paper “Mushroom Detection and Three Dimensional Pose Estimation from Multi-View Point Clouds” was accepted and published by MDPI Sensors in March 2023.

“AI for Good” is the leading action-oriented, global, and inclusive United Nations platform on Artificial Intelligence, organised by the International Telecommunication Union in partnership with 40 UN sister agencies and co-convened with Switzerland.

The last month of autumn came with a series of soft robotics events from exhibitions, talks and interviews in the heart of South Asia. The broad spectrum of dissemination activities around soft robotics projects, including SoftGrip, took place between October 28th and November 10th in various universities in Pakistan. Representing the SoftGrip consortium, Radan Pathan, a PhD researcher from The BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, participated in all those events spreading the word about the project's mission, our soft robotic grippers and the tech advancements so far.