Horticultural robotics: Seven years of experimentation

Although robotic and automated solutions have a large diffusion in most production sectors, agriculture only marginally benefited so far from automated solutions. The motivation for such marginal development of automation and robotic solutions in agriculture is related to some particularities of the specific sector, like the unstructured environment in which it is required to operate. Such environment is indeed less friendly for robots than the well structured industrial environments. A consistent share of the research effort conducted so far, mainly tried to use standard industrial robotic solutions adapting them to the intensive farming sector instead of developing brand new solutions that exploit the specific features of the agricultural sector. In this paper the particular features that valuable robotic solutions should deserve for agricultural applications are then outlined discussing also which are, in the authors' opinion, the most promising research directions for the next years. Research results attained by the authors along some of the lines previously described are illustrated. Finally, two different prototypes of robots, designed and developed by the authors' research group during the last seven years, and their experimentation in greenhouse are presented and discussed.