Field Robots for Intelligent Farms—Inhering Features from Industry

Abstract

Estimations of world population growth urgently require improving the efficiency of agricultural processes, as well as improving safety for people and environmental sustainability, which can be opposing characteristics. Industry is pursuing these objectives by developing the concept of the “intelligent factory” (also referred to as the “smart factory”) and, by studying the similarities between industry and agriculture, we can exploit the achievements attained in industry for agriculture. This article focuses on studying those similarities regarding robotics to advance agriculture toward the concept of “intelligent farms” (smart farms). Thus, this article presents some characteristics that agricultural robots should gain from industrial robots to attain the intelligent farm concept regarding robot morphologies and features as well as communication, computing, and data management techniques. The study, restricted to robotics for outdoor farms due to the fact that robotics for greenhouse farms deserves a specific study, reviews different structures for robot manipulators and mobile robots along with the latest techniques used in intelligent factories to advance the characteristics of robotics for future intelligent farms. This article determines similarities, contrasts, and differences between industrial and field robots and identifies some techniques proven in the industry with an extraordinary potential to be used in outdoor farms such as those derived from methods based on artificial intelligence, cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things, Big Data techniques, and cloud computing procedures. Moreover, different types of robots already in use in industry and services are analyzed and their advantages in agriculture reported (parallel, soft, redundant, and dual manipulators) as well as ground and aerial unmanned robots and multi-robot systems.

Development of Technological Capabilities through the Internet of Things (IoT): Survey of Opportunities and Barriers for IoT Implementation in Portugal’s Agro-Industry

“…Precision agriculture has its concept linked direct to precision, which means, to manage precisely resources, such as energy, soil, water, fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, among others, using different methods and techniques [14]. To achieve the best management, the most correct information is fundamental.…”

“…This degree of autonomy between a simple IoT device and a robot differs. Currently, most common applications in agriculture are linked to harvesting and weeding, followed by diseases detection and seeding [14]. Technological advances in machine vision, GPS, laser technologies, actuators, and mechatronics have allowed the implementation of robotic systems in agro-industry [24].…”

Emerging Line of Research Approach in Precision Agriculture: An Insight Study

“… Automated Steering System: The research work towards this approach is mainly associated with developing agricultural machinery to give them a direction towards its orientation. The existing system has used fuzzy logic (Duan et al [61]), manual priority (Fu et al [62]), renewable energy (Ghobadpour et al [63]), proportional integral derivative (Liu et al [64], Yin et al [65]), designing electro-hydraulic circuit (Mungwongsa et al [66]), field robots (Gonzalez-de-Santos et al [67]), and automatic pilot system (Wang et al [68]). The idea of the majority of such implementation orients about developing a system that can assist the agricultural machinery to accomplish specific objectives while farming.…”

Sensor and Sensor Fusion Technology in Autonomous Vehicles: A Review

“…Although AD systems share many common challenges in real-world situations, they are differed noticeably in several aspects. For instance, unmanned tractors in agriculture farm navigates between crop rows in a fixed environment, while on-road vehicles must navigate through complex dynamic environment, such as crowds and traffics [ 14 ].…”