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Modern agriculture is related to a revolution that occurred in a large group of technologies (e.g., informatics, sensors, navigation) within the last decades. In crop production systems, there are field operations that are quite labour-intensive either due to their complexity or because of the fact that they are connected to sensitive plants/edible product interaction, or because of the repetitiveness they require throughout a crop production cycle. These are the key factors for the development of agricultural robots. In this paper, a systematic review of the literature has been conducted on research and commercial agricultural robotics used in crop field operations. This study underlined that the most explored robotic systems were related to harvesting and weeding, while the less studied were the disease detection and seeding robots. The optimization and further development of agricultural robotics are vital, and should be evolved by producing faster processing algorithms, better communication between the robotic platforms and the implements, and advanced sensing systems.

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BACKGROUND Pesticide losses and uneven spray distribution should be avoided as much as possible as they reduce the effectiveness of spraying and increase environmental contamination as well as costs. Within the H2020‐project OPTIMA the goal is to develop a smart sprayer for bed‐grown carrots, including optimizations such as air support and variable nozzle spacing. This paper focuses on selecting the most optimal nozzle types, spacing and height for spraying bed‐grown crops, while taking into account different target zone widths depending on the growth stage, based on spray distribution and droplet characterization measurements. RESULTS The results indicate that four bed spray configurations consisting of four nozzles per bed, i.e. XR8004/XR8004/XR8004/XR8004, AIUB8504/AI11004/AI11004/AIUB8504, AI8004/AI8004/AI8004/AI8004 and XR8002/XR8002/XR8002/XR8002, spraying at 300 kPa and recalculated to 12.0 km h−1 forward speed, are appropriate for spraying different target zone widths (ranging from 1.2 to 2.2 m) with high uniformity (CV < 12%) and minimal losses out of the target zone (<17%) when applied at the most appropriate nozzle spacing and height (varying from 0.35 to 0.65 m). Droplet characterization measurements showed that for the same nozzle size and spray pressure, air inclusion nozzles produced larger but slower droplets than standard flat‐fan nozzles. Air support increased the droplet velocities but had only a very limited effect on droplet size. CONCLUSION Laboratory spray distribution and droplet characterization measurements allowed selection of the most optimal nozzle type, spacing and height for bed spray applications in terms of reduced pesticide losses compared to conventional broadcast applications. © 2022 Society of Chemical Industry.