Abstract
The shortage of qualified human labor is a key challenge facing farmers, limiting profit margins and preventing the adoption of sustainable and diversified agroecosystems, such as agroforestry. New technologies in robotics could offer a solution to such limitations. Advances in soft arms and manipulators can enable agricultural robots that can have better reach and dexterity around plants than traditional robots equipped with hard industrial robotic arms. Soft robotic arms and manipulators can be far less expensive to manufacture and significantly lighter than their hard counterparts. Furthermore, they can be simpler to design and manufacture since they rely on fluidic pressurization as the primary mechanisms of operation. However, current soft robotic arms are difficult to design and control, slow to actuate, and have limited payloads. In this paper, we discuss the benefits and challenges of soft robotics technology and what it could mean for sustainable agriculture and agroforestry.
Highlights
Conventional annual row-crop agriculture, while productive and labor efficient, has resulted in numerous well-documented negative externalities [1,2,3]
In our recent work [77] we presented preliminary, yet promising results on the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for position control of the BR2 soft arm
A major barrier to the adoption of agroforestry and sustainable agriculture is the shortage of labor needed to conduct intricate and skilled tasks for maintaining and researching the systems
Summary
Conventional annual row-crop agriculture, while productive and labor efficient, has resulted in numerous well-documented negative externalities [1,2,3]. Agroforestry and perennial polycultures have been proposed as a sustainable alternative with well-documented environmental benefits, but these systems generally require significantly more labor, skill, and knowledge [4]. This concept paper introduces a set of technological innovations in that will enable viable agroforestry and sustainable agriculture systems that include a wide diversity of species. Even for commodity crops, increasingly autonomous large equipment [12,13] only addresses part of the problem, especially since it cannot provide precision care once the canopy closes and because it causes soil compaction This has led to recent interest in smaller-sized robots [14,15,16,17]. We refer the reader to a recent survey on agricultural robots for further details on the state-of-the-art in this area [21]
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