Smart agriculture

Abstract

Acceptable healthy food in a high quality for all people of the world -achieving this goal can substantially be supported by a higher level of digitalization in the domain of agriculture.Latest solutions in robotics, sensor technology, information exchange and artificial intelligence enable this transformation to "Agriculture 4.0".This special issue discusses upcoming legal conditions in this context, presents opportunities due to the upcoming 5G technology, discusses indoor farming as a solution, and evaluates machine learning technologies for model optimization.Different applications are discussed in five further papers, covering the topics of robotization and navigation, field swarm technology, perception of 2D/3D-soil parameter, application specific sensor tuning, and aquaponics.Agriculture 4.0 consists of several actors along the integrated value chains and is equipped with different data sources, e. g., satellites, hyperspectral sensors at drones, and multispectral sensors on robots.To manage the perceived data by different actors along the chain, a coherent legal framework for digitalization is of great importance.In the article of Ines Haertel, a new legal data category "farm data" is discussed that guarantees the sovereignty of the agricultural data in the sense of a well-ordered agricultural digital law.Harvesting machines in agriculture are equipped with a lot of services and should act autonomously in the fields.To reach this goal, the communication between the machines and from the machines to an agricultural data space is a critical feature.To guarantee the needed properties like e. g., privacy and flexibility, the 5G technology will