Robotics Irrigation – A Key to Agricultural Revolution

Abstract

Agricultural robots are machine programmed to do agricultural task and farm assignment. Despite the large diffusion of robotic and automated solutions that took place during the last decades in most production processes, the agricultural sector benefited only marginally from automated solutions. Most of the farming is now done with machines but they are not automated, hence there is a need of another revolution in agriculture and that is robotics and automation revolution.
Agricultural robots can be classified into several groups: harvesting or picking, planting, weeding, pest control, maintenance or irrigation. Out of these, irrigation robots have been researched and implemented very less but are of a great importance to increase the production of a crop. Different type of crops has different types of irrigation requirements and should be dealt accordingly. This can be efficiently done if robotics is integrated in irrigation. Hereby, in this paper, we are proposing efficient ways of irrigation by robots, their advantages and future perspectives. Our approach is to utilize available information technologies and the proposed framework in the form of more intelligent machines to reduce and target energy inputs in more effective ways than in the past.