Professor Andrey Ronzhin is Director of St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPС RAS). His research focuses on the implementation of heterogeneous robots in agriculture. He is Member of Scientific Board of Robotics and Mechatronics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Navigation and Motion Control, and Co-Chairman of International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Robotics (ICR). He is Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Journal “Informatics and Automation”.Professor Dr. Karsten Berns is Full Professor at the University of Kaiserslautern. His present research is focused on development of reliable complex autonomous robotic systems. The main application area of his investigations is off-road robotics: autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles such as small trucks, excavators, harvesters, tractors, and rescue robots. He is Member of the IEEE, the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI), the CLAWAR Association, Member ofthe executive committee of the German Robotics Association (DGR), and Leader of the technical committee for robotic systems of the GI. He is Editor-in-Chief of Journal “Robotics and Autonomous Systems”.Academician Alexander Kostyaev is Chief Scientist of Institute of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development of the St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is Distinguished Scientist in the field of economics and planning of the agro-industrial complex, economic and social problems of the agro-industrial economy of the North. He put forward theoretical propositions that are fundamentally new to science and practice, revealing the actions of objective market laws that form territorial heterogeneity in the development of agriculture and agribusiness. In his works, he substantiated the directions of regional policy, allowing to mitigate the negative consequences of "market imperfections" in the agricultural sector of the country's economy, and investigated the mechanisms of development of rural areas.
