Editorial: Robotics for smart farms

摘要

Farming is facing many economic challenges in terms of productivity, cost-effectiveness and labor shortage (Meuwissen et al., 2019). Farming is approaching into the “smart” era, where operations become digitalized and data-driven, making possible to monitor and control many diversified and interconnected procedures such as crop growth assessment, pest control, disease monitoring, irrigation, planting, crop spraying, field analysis, among others (Klerkx et al., 2019). This approach will be carried out through an increasing number of automated devices and tools interacting with the need to track the production processes for operations optimization or traceability toward consumers. The introduction of automation, including intelligent robots, automated sensing, modeling, decision-making, artificial intelligence (AI), smart analyses, planning and actuation, and the role of genotypes versus the environment, allows the agricultural operations to be enhanced efficiency (Gonzalez-de-Santos et al., 2020). Additionally, improved actuation, sensing and monitoring of the production reduce the environmental impact, increase quality, quantity, and sustainability. Robotics for smart farms gives a unique possibility to assess and evaluate agricultural sustainability with an unprecedented level of accuracy and precision.
\nThis Research Topic provides a useful overview of the capabilities and the applications of robotic systems (both aerial and ground robots) and human-robot collaboration in combination with artificial intelligence (AI) strategies for the development of different tasks in agricultural environments.