In early 2020, the Digital Innovation Hub Ostrava (DIH Ostrava) was established, bringing together the activities of IT4In - novations and MSIC Ostrava, enabling small and medium-sized enterprises to examine and potentially address their digitalisation needs. These, unlike large companies, tend not to have the financial or human resources to commit to verifying and potentially deploying digital technologies. For this reason, the Moravian-Silesian Region also decided to support the foundation of DIH Ostrava, including a pilot financial advantage tool for selected types of services and access to supercomputing capacities.
One of the supported projects is also that of Ullmanna, a company developing an agricultural weeding machine that would allow line weed control by recognizing the target crop through machine learning. This would lead to performing agricultu - ral activity without the use of chemical sprays. “Our intended product has a significant positive impact on both the environment and society, allowing an increase in food production without the use of pesticides, which negatively affect both the envi - ronment and human health,” says Martin Ullmann from the Ullmanna company. This project uses machine learning to au - tomatically recognize crops from weeds. Within IT4Innovations, a neural network is being designed and trained to do this. Crop recognition mechanism will allow the weeding machine to remove weeds and not to damage the cultivated crop. Due to the direct deployment on the wee - ding machine, additional requirements are placed on the resulting technology regarding the HW used and the recogni - tion speed.
The subsidy for the “Digital Innovation Center Ostrava – Pilot Verification” project is pro - vided from the budget of the Moravian-Silesian Region (Contract No. 08183/2019/RRC).