Club of Bologna, history and innovation
The Club of Bologna returns to EIMA both for the November 2020 preview and the “physical” showcase of February 2021. The 30th meeting and the Pellizzi Prize are at the centre of these initiatives
This is a dual rendezvous also for the Club of Bologna initiatives that are traditionally held during EIMA on the even years. Just like the Bologna event, two different sets of meetings are also planned for the international body established in 1989 by initiative of the then Unacoma, which handles strategies for agricultural mechanization and which brings together the leading experts in the field. As part of EIMA’s Digital Preview, scheduled online from 11 to 15 November, a press conference is scheduled to present the Club’s 30th Meeting to be held during the 44th edition of EIMA, exceptionally scheduled for February, from 3 to 7. The anniversary will be celebrated during the first session of the annual meeting (6/7 February), scheduled for the first day. It will retrace the evolution of three decades of agricultural mechanization and the future directions for the sustainability sector. The other two sessions will be dedicated to market prospects and specialized mechanization for wine-growing. The Pellizzi Prize will also be doubled. This award was created to honour and remember Giuseppe Pellizzi, “the professor’s professor”, teacher and researcher in agricultural engineering, creator of the Club of Bologna. The contest, now in its fourth edition, evaluates and rewards the best worldwide graduation theses focused on agricultural machinery and equipment. The finalists’ works will be presented during an online meeting in November during the EIMA Preview. The winners will then be proclaimed during the “physical” event in February. Please note that the prize – organized in collaboration with the Accademia dei Georgofili and sponsored by FederUnacoma – includes a cash prize of 1,200, 800 and 500 euro for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place, and the possibility of participating for the next 5 years in the annual club meetings (info on www.clubofbologna.it, Pellizzi Prize section). In previous years, a total of eleven works have been rewarded, with participants from Europe, Asia and North America. Since 2012, the topics covered by the various works have been the automatic traceability for the distribution of pesticides, systematic development and analysis of continuously variable transmissions with internal power split for mobile machines, modelling and interaction with soil for the development of a disc plough operated by PTO. Also, an on-board system for assessing the yield and quality of grape harvesters, identifying the Citrus Huanglongbing disease by means of artificial vision and automatic learning, and a detection and shaking system for branches for the automatic harvesting of cherries. In particular, in the 2018 edition, the first prize went to Daeun Choi of Penn State University (USA) for a study on an intelligent system that uses infrared to know in advance how many lemons or how many oranges are on each tree and when they are ready for be harvested. The other prizes were awarded to projects concerned greater efficiency in energy consumption during planting, a machine able to dose pesticides with mobile dispensers, and another pesticide dosage system that relies on the detection and calculation in real time of the intensity and speed of the wind.
