Human-robot collaboration in agricultural robots

Agricultural robots are being developed for many agricultural tasks such as field cultivation, planting, harvesting, pruning and spraying (Edan et al., 2009; van Henten et al., 2013; Bechar and Vigneault, 2017; Baxter et al., 2018). However, in practice, current working agricultural robotic systems are limited despite intensive R&D and many feasible technical solutions that have proven successful (Blackmore, 2016; Bontsema et al., 2014; Duckett et al., 2018). Fully robotized farms are not yet available, mostly due to the unstructured, dynamically changing and undefined agricultural environment that demands a high level of sophistication and complicates the development process (Bac et al., 2014). Furthermore, each crop and task requires tailored designed developments (Bac et al., 2014). Introducing semi-autonomous operations in which a human operator cooperates with the robot can enable improved performance while overcoming the complexity that current autonomous robots face (Adamides et al., 2017a). This chapter will present initial work in the domain of human-robot collaboration (HRC) in agriculture. Additionally, we provide directions on how HRC should be further adopted to enable successful robotization of agricultural operations.