Applications and Challenges of Agricultural Robots

One commonly cited reason for the need to develop the robotics industry is labor shortages. However, the fundamental reason for advancing robotics is to free people from harsh working environments. For example, in the sweltering heat of summer, where temperatures in agricultural greenhouses can reach up to 60°C, it is imperative to replace human labor with robots, regardless of the complexity of the work. This is a human-centered necessity.

Agriculture is a complex system with numerous stages, even in simple crop cultivation, including sowing, seedling, transplanting, planting, irrigation, weeding, spraying, pruning, pinching, pollination, thinning, harvesting, transporting, and storage. Each of these stages needs to be gradually handled by robots.

Current Trends in Agricultural Robot Development

1. Research institutions currently focus on the harvesting stage, which involves solving three main challenges: identifying the harvesting target, locating the cutting position, and executing the harvesting action. Target identification requires image recognition, which aligns with the current hot trend of artificial intelligence, making it easier to secure funding. Additionally, harvesting is relatively straightforward compared to tasks like plowing, which requires high power and deals with complex underground conditions.

Common Challenges in Agricultural Robotics

1. Cost: The cost needs to be reduced to match that of ordinary agricultural machinery. Currently, a single agricultural robot can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, making it more expensive than a high-end car, which lacks cost-effectiveness. This is particularly true for robots that are used intensively for short periods and remain idle for the rest of the time, such as tea-picking robots. For example, in a tea-producing region, green tea needs to be harvested within about 14 days. Even if each robot can replace the labor of five people, a large number of robots would be needed for concentrated operations.

2. Adaptability to Complex Terrain: Agricultural terrains are complex, ranging from different slopes of mountainous areas to various environments in greenhouses, including loose soil, hard ground, muddy fields, and paddy fields. Choosing the appropriate mobility platform is already a challenging task.

3. Agricultural Machinery and Agronomy Standards: While agricultural production is standardized as a whole, it is extremely discrete in practice. Standards such as plant spacing, row spacing, and planting depth need to be unified, and this unification has distinct regional characteristics. Local conditions vary, and when designing agricultural machinery, it is essential to fully consider the actual needs of different regions. Additionally, some issues cannot be resolved by machinery alone and require solutions in the agronomy stage. For instance, instead of developing a grape-picking robot that can handle grapes growing at various angles, it might be more effective to plant grapes in a way that meets the automation needs of the picking robots. Crops are highly malleable, and changing them is often easier.

4. Stability: Timeliness is crucial in agricultural production, and nothing frustrates farmers more than machinery breaking down at a critical moment. Traditional mechanical machinery can often be repaired quickly by farmers or local repair stations, but agricultural robots have complex circuitry and software that local resources may struggle to fix promptly. If the manufacturer cannot provide timely support, it can seriously affect the farming schedule and user experience.