Agricultural Robotics and Automation

Scope

Agriculture is humankind’s oldest and still its most important economic activity, providing the food, feed, fiber, and fuel necessary for our survival. With the global population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, agricultural production must double if it is to meet the increasing demands for food and bioenergy. Given limited land, water and labor resources, it is estimated that the efficiency of agricultural productivity must increase by 25% to meet that goal, while limiting the growing pressure that agriculture puts on the environment.

Activities

IROS 2024 Workshop on AI and Robotics For Future Farming

Workshop best paper: 1st Place

Recipient(s): Huaiqu Feng, Guoyang Zhao, Cheng Liu, Yongwei Wang, Jun Wang

Title of paper: Motion-Coupled Mapping Algorithm for Hybrid Rice Canopy

Name of award: Workshop best paper: 2nd Place

Recipient(s):Arun Narenthiran Sivakumar, Federico Magistri, Mateus Valverde Gasparino, Jens Behley, Cyrill Stachniss, Girish Chowdhary

Title of paper: AdaCropFollow: Self-Supervised Online Adaptation for Visual Under-Canopy Navigation

After the workshop we gathered some students and TC members and discussed the development of agricultural robotics and automation, the process of joining the Technical Committee (TC), and suggestions for TC’s webinar, website and future plans over a dinner and happy hour event. Additionally, there was extensive communication and discussion about the 2025 IEEE ICRA and IROS international conference. Finally, everyone enjoyed the dinner and exchanged travel experiences and research interests.

IEEE AgRA Webinar #64 : AI Powered Apple Production

IEEE AgRA Webinar #64 on August 16, 2024

Title: AI Powered Apple Production

Speaker: Prof. Zhao Zhang (China Agricultural University)

Playback link: https://youtu.be/YXhFfeMV_AA

For additional information, please visit this link.

Promotional Activities for TC

We are sending some gifts and TC Introductory pages.

Location: ICRA Conference

Robotics and Sustainability Workshop @ ICRA 2024, Best Poster Award

Robotics and Sustainability Workshop @ ICRA 2024

1st Place Best Poster Award

Haichuan Li

University of Bristol

40 Trees

Tendon-driven Adaptive Perching Mechanism for Environmental  Monitoring with Aerial Robots

[email protected]

Robotics and Sustainability Workshop @ ICRA 2024

2nd Place Best Poster Award

Gonzalo Mier

Wageningen University

20 Trees

Optimized Route Planning to minimize soil compaction in single cropping and intercropping

[email protected]

Robotics and Sustainability Workshop @ ICRA 2024

3rd Place Best Poster Award

Levi Cai

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

10 Trees

Quantifying Marine Animal Response to Surveys Using Underwater Vehicles

[email protected]

2nd place presentation

1st place presentation

full room

Mirko Kavoc presentation

Hemma Philamore presentation

Berk Cali presentation

For additional infomation click here.

IEEE AgRA Webinar #62: Agricultural Robotics Technology to Support Sustainable Crop Production

Speaker: Prof. Konstantinos Karydis (University of California, Riverside)

Title: Agricultural Robotics Technology to Support Sustainable Crop Production.

This talk will cover some of our recent advances helping address both challenges.  We will discuss task and motion planning whereby task costs are uncertain and the gain of completing a task is proportional to resource consumption (such as water consumption in precision irrigation).  We will also discuss co-designed means for proximal sensing and physical sampling, with specific focus on measuring field apparent soil conductivity and designing a leaf retrieval mechanism to identify and cut leaves cleanly at their stem in tree crops for follow-on use on stem water potential analysis, respectively.  We will demonstrate full-system integration and field deployment, and highlight some of our recent efforts to open-source dataset collection and digital twin creation to further support the growth of agricultural robotics research and practice.

Overall, this presentation sheds light on sensor technologies that are propelling the development of greenhouse robots, paving the way for more sophisticated and integrated agricultural automation systems. The incorporation of these advanced sensor technologies is poised to revolutionize greenhouse operations, boosting productivity, and fostering sustainable agriculture practices.

For more information on this webinar, Click Here

IROS 2023 Workshop "Agricultural Robotics for a Sustainable Future"23 Workshop "Agricultural Robotics for a Sustainable Future"

This workshop focused on recent developments in agricultural robotics and automation. The goal is to bring together researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and methodologies for enabling robotic systems in agriculture. The workshop will provide an overview of the state-of-the-art through a series of invited and contributed sessions as well as opportunities for attendees to share their knowledge, develop new ideas, and foresee the field’s future. For real-world applications, a focus will be strengthening the relationship between robotic systems and domain-specific knowledge from plant sciences and industry personnel.

For more information on this workshop, Click Here

IROS 2023 Special Issue: Robotics and Cybernetics for Future Farming

We have organized around 12+ agricultural robotic researchers from USA, Japan, Australia, Nederland and China to launch this agricultural robotic and cybernetic issue. In addition, we have also collected 21 potential contributions (14 papers accepted) for this special issue. All this is a good guarantee to this special issue. More than 50+ audience attend this special issue, and we expand the impact of our TC and the IEEE TC organization.”

Unmanned Farming: Transforming Plant Agriculture through AI and Robotics

“‘Unmanned Farming: Transforming Plant Agriculture through AI and Robotics’  launched in  Computers and Electronics in Agriculture journal.  Recently developed technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI), have been used to guide agricultural production, greatly reducing the

use of labor and improving the efficient use of resources, thus contributing to the development of sustainable agriculture. For future plant and animal farming, AI and robotics can be deeply integrated into agriculture to develop intelligent agricultural systems and unmanned farms, through automatic agricultural production information perception, quantitative decision-making, intelligent control, precise input, and personalized service. Finally, this can make the production of agricultural produce more efficient in a sustainable way. This special issue aims to highlight the latest research in AI and robotic technologies relevant to agriculture and farming processes.”

ICRA 2023 TIG-IV Agri-Food Robotics Workshop: From Farm To Fork

As the world population rapidly grows [from 7.5 billion today] to 9.6 billion in 2050, it is becoming more important to build sustainable supply chains to keep producing high-quality foods. Improved sustainability could be achieved by methods that are highly productive, cost-effective, and environment-friendly whilst foods are processed from acquisition to consumption. Although recent advances in AI and robotics have shown significant potential, many tasks in the current design of food production still rely heavily on human labours and capabilities only. The aim of this workshop is thus to bring together world-leading roboticists and AI practitioners to discuss novel approaches to deploying robotic solutions in the food system throughout the sessions focused on (1) Farming, (2) Processing / Distribution, (3) Cooking / Serving, and (4) Legislation. These will help not only obtain a holistic understanding of the entire supply chain but also find related research questions from different domains (e.g., manipulating soft objects in fruit picking or sandwich making) at one venue. Therefore, TIG-IV will offer a great overview of the state-of-the-art through a series of invited talks and paper/poster presentations. Moreover, active participation will be encouraged to collectively identify useful insights and desired directions for future research in the community.

IEEE-RAM Special Issue: Embracing Robotics and Intelligent Machine Systems for Smart Agricultural Applications

IEEE-RAM special issue on Embracing Robotics and Intelligent Machine Systems for Smart Agricultural Applications

Future Activities

To learn about upcoming activities of the AgRA TC, please join our mail list.

Recent Activities

For recent activities and copy of the slides presented at the webinars, please visit the TC web site.