White paper - Agricultural Robotics: The Future of Robotic Agriculture

Abstract

Agri-Food is the largest manufacturing sector in the UK. It supports a food chain that generates over £108bn p.a., with 3.9m employees in a truly international industry and exports £20bn of UK manufactured goods. However, the global food chain is under pressure from population growth, climate change, political pressures affecting migration, population drift from rural to urban regions and the demographics of an aging global population. These challenges are recognised in the UK Industrial Strategy white paper and backed by significant investment via a wave 2 Industrial Challenge Fund Investment (“Transforming Food Production: from Farm to Fork”). RAS and associated digital technologies are now seen as enablers of this critical food chain transformation. To meet these challenges, here we review the state of the art of the application of RAS in Agri-Food production and explore research and innovation needs to ensure novel advanced robotic and autonomous reach their full potential and deliver necessary impacts.
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\nThe opportunities for RAS range from; the development of field robots that can assist workers by carrying weights and conduct agricultural operations such as crop and animal sensing, weeding and drilling; integration of autonomous system technologies into existing farm operational equipment such as tractors; robotic systems to harvest crops and conduct complex dextrous operations; the use of collaborative and “human in the loop” robotic applications to augment worker productivity and advanced robotic applications, including the use of soft robotics, to drive productivity beyond the farm gate into the factory and retail environment.
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\nRAS technology has the potential to transform food production and the UK has the potential to establish global leadership within the domain. However, there are particular barriers to overcome to secure this vision:
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\n1.\tThe UK RAS community with an interest in Agri-Food is small and highly dispersed. There is an urgent need to defragment and then expand the community.
\n2.\tThe UK RAS community has no specific training paths or Centres for Doctoral Training to provide trained human resource capacity within Agri-Food.
\n3.\tWhile there has been substantial government investment in translational activities at high Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs), there is insufficient ongoing basic research in Agri-Food RAS at low TRLs to underpin onward innovation delivery for industry.
\n4.\tThere is a concern that RAS for Agri-Food is not realising its full potential, as the projects being commissioned currently are too few and too small-scale. RAS challenges often involve the complex integration of multiple discrete technologies (e.g. navigation, safe operation, multimodal sensing, automated perception, grasping and manipulation, perception). There is a need to further develop these discrete technologies but also to deliver large-scale industrial applications that resolve integration and interoperability issues. The UK community needs to undertake a few well-chosen large-scale and collaborative “moon shot” projects.
\n5.\tThe successful delivery of RAS projects within Agri-Food requires close collaboration between the RAS community and with academic and industry practitioners. For example, the breeding of crops with novel phenotypes, such as fruits which are easy to see and pick by robots, may simplify and accelerate the application of RAS technologies. Therefore, there is an urgent need to seek new ways to create RAS and Agri-Food domain networks that can work collaboratively to address key challenges. This is especially important for Agri-Food since success in the sector requires highly complex cross-disciplinary activity. Furthermore, within UKRI most of the Research Councils (EPSRC, BBSRC, NERC, STFC, ESRC and MRC) and Innovate UK directly fund work in Agri-Food, but as yet there is no coordinated and integrated Agri-Food research policy per se. &#