Recent Advancements in Agriculture Robots: Benefits and Challenges

TLDR

Agricultural robots, emerging from industrial robotics and accelerated by advances in computer science, sensing, and control, offer significant benefits but remain limited by insufficient AI integration for large‑scale production. This review surveys over 100 studies to clarify the current research status of agricultural robots and outline their benefits and challenges. The authors categorize and synthesize literature on various robot types, integrating findings on perception, decision‑making, control, and execution. Integrating perception, decision‑making, control, and execution techniques has markedly refined robot performance, and the review proposes future research directions.

Abstract

In the development of digital agriculture, agricultural robots play a unique role and confer numerous advantages in farming production. From the invention of the first industrial robots in the 1950s, robots have begun to capture the attention of both research and industry. Thanks to the recent advancements in computer science, sensing, and control approaches, agricultural robots have experienced a rapid evolution, relying on various cutting-edge technologies for different application scenarios. Indeed, significant refinements have been achieved by integrating perception, decision-making, control, and execution techniques. However, most agricultural robots continue to require intelligence solutions, limiting them to small-scale applications without quantity production because of their lack of integration with artificial intelligence. Therefore, to help researchers and engineers grasp the prevalent research status of agricultural robots, in this review we refer to more than 100 pieces of literature according to the category of agricultural robots under discussion. In this context, we bring together diverse agricultural robot research statuses and applications and discuss the benefits and challenges involved in further applications. Finally, directional indications are put forward with respect to the research trends relating to agricultural robots.