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Review
. 2023 Aug 31:6:1213330.
doi: 10.3389/frai.2023.1213330. eCollection 2023.

Mobile robotics in smart farming: current trends and applications

Darío Fernando Yépez-Ponce  1   2 , José Vicente Salcedo  1 , Paúl D Rosero-Montalvo  3 , Javier Sanchis  1
Affiliations
Review

Mobile robotics in smart farming: current trends and applications

Darío Fernando Yépez-Ponce et al. Front Artif Intell. .

Abstract

In recent years, precision agriculture and smart farming have been deployed by leaps and bounds as arable land has become increasingly scarce. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), by the year 2050, farming in the world should grow by about one-third above current levels. Therefore, farmers have intensively used fertilizers to promote crop growth and yields, which has adversely affected the nutritional improvement of foodstuffs. To address challenges related to productivity, environmental impact, food safety, crop losses, and sustainability, mobile robots in agriculture have proliferated, integrating mainly path planning and crop information gathering processes. Current agricultural robotic systems are large in size and cost because they use a computer as a server and mobile robots as clients. This article reviews the use of mobile robotics in farming to reduce costs, reduce environmental impact, and optimize harvests. The current status of mobile robotics, the technologies employed, the algorithms applied, and the relevant results obtained in smart farming are established. Finally, challenges to be faced in new smart farming techniques are also presented: environmental conditions, implementation costs, technical requirements, process automation, connectivity, and processing potential. As part of the contributions of this article, it was possible to conclude that the leading technologies for the implementation of smart farming are as follows: the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile robotics, artificial intelligence, artificial vision, multi-objective control, and big data. One technological solution that could be implemented is developing a fully autonomous, low-cost agricultural mobile robotic system that does not depend on a server.

Keywords: IoT in agriculture; intelligent agriculture; mobile robotics in agriculture; path planning in agriculture; precision agriculture; smart farming; unmanned ground vehicle in agriculture.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Three-steps evaluation of literature search process (PRISMA).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Mobile robotics activities in agriculture.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Percentage of top five applications of service robots in 2020.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Future of agriculture.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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