Selected Papers from The Ag Robotic Forum—World FIRA 2021

Dear Colleagues,

Agricultural robots are able to perform much more tasks than ever and are more and more efficient in working in the agricultural context, allowing farmers to free themselves from harsh or hazardous works. As a result, agriculture robots are marketed and promoted intensively,  promising to be the new tools for agriculture. Nevertheless, the popularity of such autonomous machines relies on their ability to be used, supervised and understood by farmers in their practical situations. The human and robot interactions, whether physically or remotely, will be a key challenge to integrate these (new) robots into farmer’s everyday life. Such interactions are also important to investigate new opportunities for designing and achieving farm operations such as assistance, cooperation or even mimicking and reproducing manual gestures. This supposes to understand human behavior and adapt robotic systems to the expected work. This also implies ensuring the safety of the humans and the integrity of the robots, which is not trivial in dynamic and variable environments. 

The design of agriculture robots that really can be used by farmers and that will be flexible to adjust to different circumstances poses also several scientific challenges in numerous topics such as perception, coordinated control, use of artificial intelligence, interface, or cobotics. This Special Issue aims at sharing the latest scientific advances for agricultural robotics on the following topics.

• Human–robot(s)–environment interactions
• Remote control and supervision of (collaborative) robots used in agriculture
• Agricultural environment awareness and adaptation to farming situation
• Robot safety and security in the agriculture framework
• Advanced hardware and software design methods

Dr. Roland Lenain
Dr. Eric Lucet
Guest Editors

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