Robotics and Intelligent Machines in Smart Agriculture: Emerging Systems and Applications

This book showcases new ideas and innovations in agricultural practices, including increased efficiency, reduced labour costs, optimized resource utilization, and enhanced crop quality. It covers the application of sensing, monitoring, data processing, learning, decision support, automated control, and smart technology that will help the agricultural entrepreneur run the farm or food processing plant. Key Features: Discusses comprehensively the use of robotics and intelligent machine systems for smart agricultural production. Covers topics such as the agricultural value chain, from plant and animal breeding to on-farm production, transportation, packaging, and food processing. Presents smart technology that will assist the agricultural entrepreneur in the operational management of the farm or food processing facility by sensing, monitoring, data processing, and learning, as well as decision assistance and automation control. Showcases the role of robotics in smart agricultural applications such as soil analysis, environmental monitoring, cloud seeding, sowing seeds, harvesting, and weed control. Explains passive and active perception using remote and proximal sensing, and development of task-based robots for intelligent farming systems. It is written for senior undergraduates, graduate students, and academic researchers in diverse fields, including electrical engineering, electronics and communication engineering, agriculture engineering, and computer science engineering.