The global population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. Feeding this growing population more sustainably is a huge challenge facing agriculture. Developing agricultural robotics is seen as one potential solution to tackling this challenge. Advances in agri-food robotics reviews the utilisation of agricultural robots to deal with increasing labour shortages in agriculture whilst bringing greater precision and efficiency into farming operations. The book addresses recent advances in agricultural robotic technologies and how these can be optimised to monitor and manage crop production more effectively, from phenotyping for improved varieties to harvesting the finished product. In its comprehensive exploration of the technologies available, the book provides farmers with the means necessary to invest - and trust - in agricultural robotics to improve the productivity and profitability of their farm. With its distinguished editors and expert team of authors, Advances in agri-food robotics will be a standard reference for academic researchers in crop and livestock science, agricultural engineers, data scientists, as well as government and private sector agencies supporting sustainable agriculture and the development of agricultural technology.

Today's real-world problems and applications in sensory systems and target detection require efficient, comprehensive and fault-tolerant multi-sensor allocation. This book presents the theory and applications of novel methods developed for such sophisticated systems. It discusses the advances in multi-agent systems and AI along with collaborative control theory and tools. Further, it examines the formulation and development of an allocation framework for heterogeneous multi-sensor systems for various real-world problems that require sensors with different performances to allocate multiple tasks, with unknown a priori priorities that arrive at unknown locations at unknown time. It demonstrates how to decide which sensor to allocate to which tasks when and where. Lastly, it explains the reliability and availability issues of task allocation systems, and includes methods for their optimization. The presented methods are explained, measured, and evaluated by extensive simulations, and the results of these simulations are presented in this book. This book is an ideal resource for academics, researchers and graduate students as well as engineers and professionals and is relevant for various applications such as sensor network design, multi-agent systems, task allocation, target detection, and team formation.

This book provides a comprehensive review of key advances in the use of robots in agriculture. Chapters summarise developments in location and guidance systems, GPS technologies, machine vision, navigation, actuation, communication and control technologies. The second part of the book discusses deploying these techniques to save labour, improve precision, speed and efficiency in agricultural operations. Chapters review the state of the art on the use of agricultural robots in planting, crop monitoring, spraying, irrigation and weed management. There are also reviews of orchard management and harvesting, harvesting of soft fruit and in-field grading of harvested produce. Other chapters cover the application of robotics in the livestock sector.

Today's real-world problems and applications in sensory systems and target detection require efficient, comprehensive and fault-tolerant multi-sensor allocation. This book presents the theory and applications of novel methods developed for such sophisticated systems. It discusses the advances in multi-agent systems and AI along with collaborative control theory and tools. Further, it examines the formulation and development of an allocation framework for heterogeneous multi-sensor systems for various real-world problems that require sensors with different performances to allocate multiple tasks, with unknown a priori priorities that arrive at unknown locations at unknown time. It demonstrates how to decide which sensor to allocate to which tasks when and where. Lastly, it explains the reliability and availability issues of task allocation systems, and includes methods for their optimization. The presented methods are explained, measured, and evaluated by extensive simulations, and the results of these simulations are presented in this book. This book is an ideal resource for academics, researchers and graduate students as well as engineers and professionals and is relevant for various applications such as sensor network design, multi-agent systems, task allocation, target detection, and team formation.