Robotic technology has the potential to transform the agriculture industry, helping it to face the challenges of a rapidly rising global population and increased urbanisation. Dr Khasha Ghaffarzadeh, Research Director at IDTechEx, explains how.
Robots and drones: addressing
agricultural challenges A
griculture is facing major long-term challenges. Some forecasts suggest that the world population is set to grow by 2.3 billion by 2050. This, together with rising global income levels that typically increase food demand per capital, would require raising food production in 2050 by 70 per cent compared to 2005 levels. In parallel, the world continues to urbanise at pace. Indeed, forecasts suggest that 70 per cent of the world population will live in an urban environment by 2050 compared with nearly 50 per cent in 2009. This will adversely impact the availability of labour near agricultural lands. Furthermore, many agricultural activities demand seasonal labour. In many instances accommodating this need would require continued flexibility towards migrant workers, an objective that may become more difficult in places in the light of events such as Brexit. It is within this context that the 14 Industry Europe
automation of agricultural tasks finds its economic purpose. In parallel to all these structural challenges, our current production processes can often have long-term unintended environmental and health consequences. In particular, the use of non-selective herbicides continues to be a source of concern in Europe. The advent of agricultural robots can accelerate the uptake of ultra-precision agriculture, helping to enable farm management on a site-specific, and then later individual planetspecific, basis. This would result in an optimal use of agrochemicals tailored to the needs of individual sites or plants. IDTechEx Research has been analysing the technologies and markets for agricultural robots and drones. In this article, I have chosen to primarily focus on two development axes within the world of robotics that are impacting agriculture: (1) advanced vision and (2) autonomous mobility.
Many ideas discussed here are decades old, but they are only becoming commercially viable now, thanks to dramatic year-on-year improvements in the performance and price of computing power, sensing technologies, energy storage, electric motors, and so on.
Advanced vision to enable ultra-precision agriculture? Vision technology is already in use in agriculture. A simple use case is in organic farming, in which a tractor-pulled implement must be precisely driven along narrow rows to mechanically hoe out weeds. Here, basic vision technology can help: a camera mounted on the implement traces the crop row, identifying objects outside the row. It then controls a side shifting mechanism to adjust the position of the mechanical hoe. The latest generations of this technology are essentially multiple ruggedised computers and camera systems integrated into the
