ABSTRACT
An advance in electronics and computing is influencing agriculture in numerous ways. Agricultural robots (ag-robots) can be classified into two broad categories: manipulators and unmanned agricultural ground vehicles (UAGVs). This chapter focuses on unmanned agricultural ground vehicles (UAGV) development and their applications, and factors affecting the advancement and widespread acceptance of UAGVs. It discusses the further developmental work on the techno-economics of (ag-robots), machine data acquisition and telematics, and the inevitability of a standardized control framework for swarms of UAGVs. Manipulator type ag-robots are predominantly used in the food processing, dairy, horticulture, and orchard industries. UAGVs navigate fields autonomously to complete an assigned agricultural production task, and at a basic level, are comprised of an instrumented mobile platform with onboard sensors, and computing hardware with algorithms and software. UAGV swarms have the ability to generate big data sets related to crops and soil from long hours of unsupervised field operations.
