85. The impact of regulation on autonomous crop equipment in Europe

Abstract

Governments required on-site human supervision for the crop robots being tested throughout Europe in 2020. For arable farms, initial evidence suggested that requiring on-site human supervision could lead to robots being used on larger farms with large fields where one human can supervise multiple robots. In spite of the technical progress in crop robotics, the legal, regulatory and policy issues around this technology have hardly been explored. Some observers suggest that, at this point, those issues may be a bigger challenge to implementation of crop robotics than the technical aspects.