Comparison of robot concepts for new sustainable crop production systems

Abstract

In recent decades the agricultural intensification led to a landscape simplification, where once heterogeneous landscapes turned into more monocultured cropping regions. The main driver behind it was to be able to use larger and more powerful agricultural machinery in order to increase productivity and specially to decrease labor costs. With the advent of robots in combination with new methods of AI it is obvious that this is not only a new step of automated mechanization. New robotic systems open up new opportunities of how to cultivate crop plants. Different robotic concepts with different properties are discussed and how these might contribute to achieve the indisputably needed improvements in sustainable and environmental-friendly crop production systems. In a performed case study, it is demonstrated that even if larger robotic solutions when operated in isolation still can achieve higher area outputs, smaller and often specialized robotic systems can achieve a substantially improved work quality in the use case of seeding.