Agriculture Automation

Introduction of automation into agriculture has lowered production costs, reduced the drudgery of tedious manual labor, increased the level of accuracy of mechanized operations, raised the level of quality of fresh produce, and improved environmental control. Unlike industrial applications that often deal with relatively simple, repetitive, well-defined, and known a priori tasks, agriculture automation usually requires advanced technologies to deal with the relatively more complex and highly unstructured and dynamic nature of both biological produce and the environment. Since the product being dealt with is of relatively low value, the cost of the automated system must be relatively low for it to be economically justified. The seasonal nature of agriculture and the many different cultivars and crops make it difficult to achieve high utilization found in the manufacturing industries. The complex agricultural environment, combined with the intensive production require development of robust systems with fast speeds and low costs. Inherent safety and reliability are necessary. This chapter reviews agricultural automation systems with focus on recent advances in sensors, Internet of Things, robotics, and AI as related to field and fruit production systems, greenhouse, and livestock automation.