Agricultural and Field Robotics: An Introduction

Pushed by the critical needs for addressing insufficient field labor availability and rapidly increasing labor costs in agriculture and other field operations and pulled by the successes and realized benefits of adopting robotic technologies in other industrial applications, robotized agricultural and field operations have been envisioned (and adopted to some extent) to either replace or assist human workers performing laborious and/or dangerous tasks. Technically, agricultural or field robots have three basic abilities of (i) perceiving operational situations, (ii) making intelligent operational decisions, and (iii) implementing the operations automatically. This chapter provides an overview of the fundamental technologies for agricultural and field robots, as well as some specific challenges and opportunities agricultural and field robotics are facing.