Robots in Agriculture: State of Art and Practical Experiences

Abstract

The presence of robots in agriculture has grown significantly in recent years, overcoming some of the challenges and complications of this field. This chapter aims to collect a complete and recent state of the art about the application of robots in agriculture. The work addresses this topic from two perspectives. On the one hand, it involves the disciplines that lead the automation of agriculture, such as precision agriculture and greenhouse farming, and collects the proposals for automatizing tasks like planting and harvesting, environmental monitoring and crop inspection and treatment. On the other hand, it compiles and analyses the robots that are proposed to accomplish these tasks: e.g. manipulators, ground vehicles and aerial robots. Additionally, the chapter reports with more detail some practical experiences about the application of robot teams to crop inspection and treatment in outdoor agriculture, as well as to environmental monitoring in greenhouse farming.

A study of influential factors in designing self-reconfigurable robots for green manufacturing

“…Then, our hypothesized model of self-reconfigurable robot design will be tested empirically using a longitudinal survey of engineers with experience in building self-reconfigurable robots for the agriculture sector. Using selfreconfigurable robots in agriculture is aimed at building intelligently efficient farming systems performing repetitive and cumbersome operations such as seeding, weeding, irrigation, culling fruits, and removing those failed to thrives Roldán et al (2018).…”

“…We found that, in contrast to other fields such as industrial processes, the agriculture field has complex tasks which cannot be simply organised and modularised to be performed in simple actions via self-reconfigurable robots. Hence, we choose the greenhouse farming as it needs more investigation on how self-reconfigurable robots can be applied Roldán et al (2018).…”

From Smart Farming towards Agriculture 5.0: A Review on Crop Data Management

“…When active sensors are used, weather conditions such as strong sunlight or poor illumination are not a serious problem anymore, and, in case of on-the-fly processing, real-time applications are possible, as spraying weeds with the previous detection of the pest [47]. There has been a significant impulse in the last five years for the particular case where data is retrieved from an autonomous platform (unmanned ground vehicle or UGV) [48][49][50][51][52]. Aravind et al [48] reviewed ground robots for tilling, soil analysis, seeding, transplanting, crop scouting, pest control, weed removal and harvesting, where crop scouting has been defined as the process of continuously monitoring the field to acquire information on the plant status, disease incidence, and infestations affecting crop growth.…”

A Machine Learning Approach to Growth Direction Finding for Automated Planting of Bulbous Plants

“…In recent years, agricultural robotics has become an area of intense research as governments around the world target the economic potential of automation in this sector 1,2 . These economic advantages stem not only from reduced labour costs, but also from more precision planting, harvesting, and advanced care of crops, leading to higher yields 3 . These reduced production costs can then help in reducing food costs for consumers.…”