Abstract
Legal structures may form barriers to, or enablers of, adoption of precision agriculture management with small autonomous agricultural robots. This article develops a conceptual regulatory framework for small autonomous agricultural robots, from a practical, self-contained engineering guide perspective, sufficient to get working research and commercial agricultural roboticists quickly and easily up and running within the law. The article examines the liability framework, or rather lack of it, for agricultural robotics in EU, and their transpositions to UK law, as a case study illustrating general international legal concepts and issues. It examines how the law may provide mitigating effects on the liability regime, and how contracts can be developed between agents within it to enable smooth operation. It covers other legal aspects of operation such as the use of shared communications resources and privacy in the reuse of robot-collected data. Where there are some grey areas in current law, it argues that new proposals could be developed to reform these to promote further innovation and investment in agricultural robots.
Highlights
Self-driving vehicles are rapidly arriving both on (Guizzo 2011) and off (Blackmore et al 2004) roads
The manufacturer argues that the accident occurred independently as the robot was acting autonomously, the insurers refuse to indemnify the manufacturer based on the argument that the operation which caused the accident is not a ‘defect’, the injured party claims that the accident is caused by manufacturer defect regardless of robot autonomy
48 EU Parliament, ‘Civil Law Rules in Robotics’, 17. Such as an error in the algorithm causing injurious behaviour.49 (See notes above on how technical designs can aid the law in this area mainly because of attribution problems) (b) For robots sold with open source software, liability should in principle be on the person who programmed the application which led to the robot causing damage
Summary
Self-driving vehicles are rapidly arriving both on (Guizzo 2011) and off (Blackmore et al 2004) roads. The present study reviews the relevant legal frameworks from a practical engineering implementer of agricultural robotics technologies to fill this need It is intended as a self-contained guide for practising engineers to find all the information needed to get their autonomous agricultural robotic research systems up and running, quickly and within the law. Automated tractor systems have been developed (Ishida et al 1998; Michio et al 2002; Blackmore et al 2004; Dvorak 2016) based on existing manual-drive tractors, which already have commercially available high precision GPS guidance. These systems compute paths to swathe fields, typically in rows with headland turns. Automated tractors typically aim to perform the same type of work as manual-drive tractors, namely bulk operations across whole fields, such as seeding, spraying and harvesting of row crops
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