Advances in human-robot collaboration in agricultural robotics

Introduction of robotics into agriculture has the potential to lower production costs, reduce the drudgery of tedious manual labor, increase the level of accuracy of mechanized operations, and improve environmental control. Unlike industrial applications that often deal with relatively simple, repetitive, well-defined, and known a priori tasks, agriculture robots usually require advanced technologies to deal with the relatively more complex and highly unstructured and dynamic nature of both biological produce and the environment. This chapter reviews agricultural robotic systems with a focus on recent advances in human-robot collaboration.