The ROSE challenge is co-financed by :

• the French Ministry of Agriculture and Food 
• the French Ministry for an Ecological and Solidary Transition

via the French Biodiversity Agency (AFB)

• the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation

via the French National Research Agency (ANR)

The French Biodiversity Agency is a public organisation under the supervision of the Ministry for an Ecological and Solidary Transition. It works to support the implementation of public policy in the fields of knowledge about and the protection, management and restoration of terrestrial, aquatic and marine biodiversity. It supports public stakeholders and also works in close partnership with socio-economic players. It is also committed to reaching out to the public to engage citizens in favour of biodiversity.

The French National Research Agency is a public administrative organisation under the supervision of the Ministry of Research. Working to serve the scientific community and those involved in research, the agency finances research projects in France. Through a competitive selection process in accordance with fundamental international principles, the ANR strives to:

• contribute to the development of science and technology ;
• promote creativity, openness, new ideas and partnerships ;
• encourage interactions between disciplines and strengthen public-private links at a national, European and international level.

As such, the agency has set up a specific financing instrument called Challenge. Created in 2008, this system aims to encourage multiple teams to work simultaneously to find novel solutions to the same issue. It stimulates creativity, encourages researchers to challenge their ideas and promotes the establishment of standards to compare different approaches. Several teams are thus selected to examine the same scientific question, and receive funding to develop innovative solutions and test them at regular intervals during joint experiment campaigns, in a spirit of both cooperation and competition.

The challenge is organised by LNE and INRAE

LNE, the leading national metrology laboratory for industry, works to support companies in their quest for innovation and anticipate new measurement and testing requirements linked to technological developments and society’s new expectations in the fields of health, safety, quality and environmental protection.

Since 2008, LNE, as a trusted third party, has been performing evaluations in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics.

LNE is therefore providing the ROSE Challenge with its skills in organising evaluation campaigns, defining test scenarios and designing test environments and verified, annotated test databases, together with its expertise in metrology applied to AI to measure the performance of the intelligent systems evaluated in a rigorous, repeatable manner using metrics and uncertainty analysis.

INRAE, the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, was born on 1 January 2020. It is the result of the merger between INRA, the National Institute for Agricultural Research, and Irstea, the National Institute for Research in Science and Technology for the Environment and Agriculture. It is the first research organisation specialising in these three scientific fields.

INRAE’s ambition is to build research excellence at the service of knowledge production, teaching, innovation, in support of public policies, in order to accelerate transitions in agriculture, food and the environment to achieve sustainable development goals.

The INRAE centre in Clermont-Ferrand and more particularly the “Technologies and Information Systems for Agro-systems TSCF” research unit conducts research, expertise and testing activities on 3 strong themes: Agricultural Robotics, Digital Agriculture, Technologies for land application, relying mainly on engineering sciences and information and communication sciences and technologies.

Within the framework of the ROSE challenge, the TSCF research unit is providing the infrastructures of its research and experimentation site in Montoldre (03) (experimental plots, metrology, information systems, reception facilities…) on which the evaluation campaigns will be organised.