Robots and Autonomous Machines for Agriculture Production

The growth of the global population has put agricultural production in a difficult position. The drastic rise in population requires doubling agricultural production to meet the increasing demand. People have to produce more food to satiate the dietary needs of the billions of people in the world. Meanwhile, the population is aging and the level of agricultural labor is reducing, with agricultural production costs rising accordingly. Crippling labor shortages threaten the survival of farmers in many countries. This need has caused farmers to turn to robots and autonomous machines for the future. With the help of robots and autonomous machines, farmers can be freed from heavy labor and improve their management level and working efficiency. The applications of robots and autonomous machines have gradually penetrated all chains of agricultural production. They can help to mitigate labor shortages by reducing our reliance on manpower and can improve agricultural productivity to support sustainable economic development and growth.

Robots and autonomous machines represent a high level of application of automation to agriculture, which is based on a precise and resource-efficient approach that attempts to sustainably achieve a higher efficiency in the production of agricultural goods with an increased quality. The benefits of robots and autonomous machines in agriculture involve increasing crop yields and quality while reducing the environmental impact. Recently, due to the improvement of the performance of artificial intelligence, precision farming, and advanced control, they have been widely used in a variety of agricultural applications, including the management of seedlings, disease detection, crop monitoring and protection, yield estimation, and crop harvesting. Reacting technologies based on agricultural robots and autonomous machines are separate but closely related sectors that cover the process of applying automatic control and robotic platforms at all levels of agricultural production. This is also one of the mainstream research directions of current researchers.

In a robot or autonomous system, because of the complexity of the operation environment of agriculture production, sensing and control in agriculture are especially difficult. The open robot system has a good expansibility, versatility, and flexible operation ability. The establishment of an agricultural robot control system in line with the open definition and characteristics can ensure reliability and real-time control. These challenges (and others) related to the application of robots and autonomous machines for agricultural production are expected to be covered in research and review manuscripts submitted to this Special Issue. The purpose of this Special Issue is to explore the various methods used for dealing with general problems in robots and autonomous machines applied for agriculture production. We invite the submission of studies focused on applications in this topic.

Dr. Jin Yuan
Dr. Wei Ji
Dr. Qingchun Feng
Guest Editors

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