Rick van Essen

Rick van Essen is a Researcher at Wageningen University & Research in the Agricultural Biosystems Engineering department. His work focuses on agricultural robotics, combining deep learning, path planning, and computer vision to optimize automated tasks in farming environments.

Research Trends

His recent publications emphasize UAV navigation in agricultural fields, weed localization using reinforcement learning, and object detection in cluttered environments like fishing vessels. Key applications include sweet pepper maturity classification and grape bunch detection, leveraging multi-view data and economic decision models.

Projects

• PhD Project: Learning optimal visual search strategies for agricultural robots (2021–present), focusing on UAVs and sensor optimization.

Dataset Contributions

Van Essen has contributed to datasets for UAV path planning and automatic discard registration in marine environments.