Review: Advances in Agriculture Robotics

Authors: Kevin Esteban Arias, Andres Felipe Dulcey, Jonatan Triana Martinez

Universidad Central

1 Introduction
There are currently 193 countries that have officially joined the United Nations, each
with its own particular problems. However, according to the UN, all these countries
must pay attention to a common problem, the growth of the world population. As a
result, rural producers are looking for new ways to produce their food in smaller and
smaller environments, since in 1991 the percentage of arable land worldwide was around
39.47 and in 2013 it was around 37.7, i.e. a 1.77 reduction in the availability of arable
land. World Health Organization , imposed various forms of restriction of social and
economic rights occupations.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the isolation measures imposed
by COVID-19 prevent farmers from accessing inputs and product markets by increasing
post-harvest losses. In contrast, in wealthy countries, such as the United States, because
farming is considered ”hard work” and unprofitable, young people are seeking job oppor-
tunities in urban regions, so farmers are looking for new ways to automate their farms
and thus recoup losses. Fortunately, to overcome the challenges imposed by population
growth, accelerated urbanization, high competitiveness of high quality products, lack of
skilled labor and the vulnerability of human labor to health risk situations, scientific
advances in different areas of human knowledge are transforming the way agricultural
activities are managed, increasingly reducing human intervention. On the other hand,
the AP describes it as ”a management strategy that uses electronic information and other
technologies to collect, process and analyze spatial data and temporal data to guide spe-
cific actions that improve the efficiency, productivity and sustainability of agricultural
operations”.
This definition clearly describes the use of technologies as a means to improve farming
operations.

2 Body
In the following article the advances and different ways of applying robotics in agriculture
are presented and materials are used especially to review each of these elements, giving
the reader an idea of how they carried out the process from data collection of scientific
information, robotic systems in commercial stage which was through data sheets and
finally an evaluation of the different robots to highlight the main technologies used to
perform each task in the agricultural area and improve the market.
Agriculture has different applications in which a robot could operate therefore they give

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a good start in the section applications of robotics in agriculture, differentiating the
different tasks that can be presented as, for example: soil preparation before plant-
ing, sowing/planting, plant treatment, harvesting and yield estimation and phenotyping.
Therefore, the following subsections will address the various types of robotics system
applications in individual agricultural environments by clarifying to the reader the vast
scope of the agricultural sector. Brief explanations of each sector are given below.
Robotic applications in agriculture for soil preparation prior to planting: Understanding
the steps to be taken to prepare the soil and start planting but taking into account the
climatic conditions that could present a challenge to develop a robot to operate in difficult
terrain but still create a robot capable of assisting workers not only in fertilizing soil but
also for pest control, soil management, harvesting and transportation.

3 Article Structure
• 1). What is the structure of the article? Is the structure appropriate?
The structure of the article is made up of 5 sections that represent the way in which
the article will be read, the first section is the introduction that initially explains
how the reading will be treated and the definition of some concepts that will be
necessary to understand. . . . the article and in turn a brief explanation of each of
the sections. The second section ”Materials and methods” focuses on the different
sources that were used, data, files, etc. to understand the topic. The third section,
”Agricultural Robotics Applications”, focuses on how robots are applied in different
situations, be it weather or terrain, providing an understanding of what is needed for
the agricultural sector in general. The fourth section ”Discussion”, where the data
collected from the different robotic systems is seen and the most common difficulties
are investigated. Finally, in the last section “Conclusions”.
• 2). What can be said about the structure of the bibliography?
The structure of the bibliography is represented It is really extensive, and in most
of the time of the article they highlight that some idea of a paragraph has been
taken from some other author and that this serves as a point of support, but as the
bibliography is so extensive, it is difficult to determine a few books in which to be
guided since we have a wide range of knowledge to choose from.
• 3). What is the structure of the abstract and conclusions?
The summary gives a small clue about the subject and the advances that have been
obtained over time for agriculture, in the conclusion part the idea of proposing new
advances is made but first you have to study the different existing works in the
agriculture and finally carry out a systematic review of agricultural robots applied
in the execution of land and different percentages were observed where they see what
type of work is carried out more.
• 4). What is the structure of the introduction? Is the structure appropriate?
The structure of the introduction is correct as it meets the requirements that are
normally used to give context to the research topic in each of the sections which is
the best way to give the reader everything they need to know before understanding
what robotics in agriculture is.

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4 Conclusions
• Robotics is essential for the automation of the agricultural area, since it contains
all the necessary tools for automation, in addition to this great advances have been
achieved in this area as robots more efficient in their proposed tasks and with better
technologies that previously did not have.
• Currently agriculture has declined a lot in their food crops, since the covid-19 farmers
are complicated by this task. For this reason a conclusion is reached which would be
to use robots to perform these tasks and thus facilitate the lives of farmers through
today’s technology.
• Every day technology and robotics is advancing too much and this will increasingly
improve the quality of life of people and in this case of farmers, thinking in the future
a complete automation of agriculture and with better results in this area.