AgriRobots

arXiv:2608.02270v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agriculture 4.0 robotic systems improve field efficiency yet remain too capital-intensive for the fragmented smallholdings that dominate global agriculture. Meanwhile, a growing number of retired low-speed electric-vehicle (LSEV) powertrains retain functional electromechanical value but are destructively recycled. This paper presents TS-MAMP (Telescopic-Sleeve Modular Agricultural Mobile Platform), a remanufactured robot built under 3R (reduce, reuse, recycle) circular-economy principles. Retired 48 V brushless-DC (BLDC) hub motors are paired via back-EMF matching, and lead-acid battery modules screened at 60%-80% state of health are actively balanced within a 100 mV inter-module voltage deviation. Together, these reused components reduce the powertrain-and-chassis BOM cost by approximately 60%, to below USD 450 (perception and weeding modules excluded). The truss chassis provides >=200 kg static load, continuously adjustable track width

A £20 million competition has opened to develop farm robots and automated technology for crops, livestock, horticulture and forestry. Agr...

To offset an ageing agricultural workforce and boost sustainable yields, China is aggressively accelerating the adoption of farm drones – a trend that analysts say could spread to more emerging markets despite trade restrictions imposed by the United States. Industry leader DJI said its global sales of agricultural drones had exceeded 700,000 units across China and more than 100 other countries and regions by the end of last month – more than a fivefold increase in just five years. Use of the...

China’s agriculture sector needs more advanced technology and innovation to boost yields and improve food security – not more farmland and crops, according to a rural policy expert. The remarks came after a state media investigation alleged that officials in central China had inflated the size of mandatory rice crops to hit their targets. CCTV programme Focus Report aired its investigation on July 14, claiming officials in Jianghua Yao – a county in Yongzhou, Hunan province – had misreported the...

MANHATTAN, Kan. — As Kansas wheat harvest wraps up, producers are leaving the field with something just as valuable as the grain in their trucks: data that can drive smarter decisions for years to come. Deepak Joshi, a precision agriculture specialist at Kansas State University, said yield data collected by combine harvesters is one of […] The post Data and Drones Helping Farmers Squeeze More From Every Acre appeared first on Morning Ag Clips.

An electric, modular robot equipped with sensors, capable of moving non-invasively through orchards and vineyards and detecting crop diseases, is now available to farmers and agricultural producers.

Most autonomous-systems research happens in controlled or semi-controlled environments, and that framing matters more than it first appears.

Andrew James (from left), Neil Morrison, Natalia Kurz and Michael Neiss work on a prototype of their weed-killing robot ahead of The Farm Robotics Challenge, which they won on May 21. By Holly Hartigan A team of Cornell undergraduates beat 95 other teams to take the grand prize at The Farm Robotics Challenge with their […]

A pair of Midwestern farmers say the wet spring and summer has them keeping an eye out for crop diseases. Thomas Perkins started farming in central Illinois in Effingham County in 2016. “We’ve already applied fungicide with the drone on some of our early, early planted corn.”  He says, “We’re starting to see a little […] The post Farmers finding value in fungicides and drones appeared first on Brownfield Ag News.

arXiv:2607.12065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While visual navigation has been extensively studied in agricultural robotics, most existing systems assume daytime conditions. In fact, deploying autonomous robots at night offers significant advantages, including 24-hour crop and soil monitoring, fruit harvesting, and nocturnal pest detection. Modern vision-based systems, however, rely heavily on large-scale well-annotated image datasets, which remains challenging to obtain for nighttime operation scenarios. To address this, we propose an unsupervised image translation framework that converts daytime plant-row RGB images into near-infrared (NIR) nighttime counterparts without requiring pixel-to-pixel supervision. This enables the direct reuse of daytime semantic labels for training nighttime perception models. In particular, by incorporating a pre-trained Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, the proposed framework is designed to preserve semantic consistency during

Plus: FMC's new herbicide The post AgriFood Signals: Chipotle’s next agrifood cohort, John Deere settlement, fruit-harvesting robots appeared first on AgFunderNews.

The director of conservation agriculture and farm operations at Missouri Soybeans says the future of farming includes more robotics, precision agriculture and innovative technologies designed to improve efficiency. Clayton Light tells Brownfield “Obviously robotics are up and coming, very promising, but it’s going to take a while for it to get there. Definitely the drones […] The post Missouri Soybeans: robotics, precision ag and innovation are shaping the future of farming appeared first on Brownfield Ag News.

AMRUT Drone Mission and Salam Kisan partnered to connect trained drone pilots with farmers, expanding precision agriculture, improving input efficiency, creating rural livelihoods, and accelerating drone adoption across Maharashtra.

arXiv:2607.06337v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic tree-fruit harvesting is a flagship problem for agricultural automation, but progress is bottlenecked by the cost and irreproducibility of field experiments: an orchard is available only weeks a year, every tree is different, and a control error can permanently damage the crop or the plant. The tree models used in graphics and agronomy are geometrically detailed but physically inert, while the GPU-parallel simulators used in robot learning contain no plausible trees. We present OrchardBench, a physically-grounded, GPU-parallel simulation of apple-orchard trees on the Newton engine. Each tree is grown by a stochastic L-system and instantiated as a fully articulated body: branches are compliant torsional spring-dampers whose stiffness follows Euler-Bernoulli beam theory, they break at a wood modulus of rupture and fall as free hinges, and apples are independent bodies on stem tethers that detach at literature-grounded pull forces

A crop protection specialist says spray drones can play an important role on today’s farms. WinField United’s Tyler Steinkamp tells Brownfield, “Drones, especially as we continue to develop this technology, they just keep getting better and better.” He says growers can use them for a variety of crop protection applications. “Any pesticide that is currently […] The post Are drones a useful tool for farming operations? appeared first on Brownfield Ag News.

A report suggests that upcoming nuclear waste-powered radiovoltaic batteries could last as long as 30 years and power next-gen drones.

Iran deal tested by drone attack as Trump offers up US farm goods  Fox NewsSee more headlines & perspectives on Google News

Iran deal tested by drone attack as Trump offers up US farm goods  Fox NewsSee more headlines & perspectives on Google News

ITHACA, N.Y. — A team of Cornell undergraduates beat out 95 other teams to take the grand prize at The Farm Robotics Challenge with their invention: an autonomous robot that kills weeds with electricity. Their robot can travel through a vineyard or orchard without a human operator, zapping weeds with a small amount of electricity, […] The post Undergrads’ Weed-Killing Robot Wins Top Prize appeared first on Morning Ag Clips.

The role of drones in crop protection is growing. Tyler Steinkamp is the crop protection product manager for WinField United. He tells Brownfield more growers are leveraging drone technology to spray their fields. “Farmers, applicators, we’re attracting a lot of people to the ag industry having these spray drones out there,” he said. “It’s something […] The post Spray drones gaining ground in crop protection appeared first on Brownfield Ag News.

Robotic 'cobots' could help English soft fruit growers move harvested crops faster, ease labour pressure and reduce waste under a new Innova...

arXiv:2606.20239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Drones are increasingly used in agriculture, where tight margins demand efficient planning. Current optimization tools suffer from exponential runtimes as problem sizes grow, necessitating practical heuristics for daily operations. This paper presents an operational framework and benchmarking analysis for drone spraying operations. We evaluate the trade-offs between facility siting methods and tiered routing parameters. For facility siting, comparing a Mixed-Integer Program (MIP) baseline against a $p$-Median heuristic shows that the heuristic reduces runtime by three orders of magnitude, from over 97 seconds to under 1.2 seconds, with only a 4\% reduction in serviced field area. For route planning, a tiered problem decomposition approach partitioning the target area into 6 to 8 spatial clusters reduces computation time by an order of magnitude with minimal degradation in serviced area. This framework achieves minute-scale planning on

arXiv:2606.11381v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robotic strawberry harvesting requires precise 6D pose estimation; however, collecting 6D pose ground truth in real agricultural fields is inherently challenging. Existing strawberry 6D pose estimation studies have therefore relied mainly on synthetic data, often without sufficient scene-level realism,leaving their performance under real agricultural field conditions unquantified. In this work, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first real-world 6D pose ground truth dataset of strawberries collected in actual agricultural fields (12,040 images). We also introduce a synthetic dataset rendered in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, featuring scene-level realism and domain randomization. Despite this improved simulation setup, our experiments reveal that a substantial sim-to-real gap persists, underscoring the necessity of real agricultural field data for reliable evaluation. We further quantify the sim-to-real gap through baseline 6D pose

arXiv:2606.14089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic apple harvesting offers a promising solution to labor shortages in commercial orchards, but low throughput and poor performance in orchard environments hinder its commercial adoption. This paper presents a modular dual-arm apple harvesting robot that uses a vertically stacked arms to enable simultaneous operation in the upper and lower zones of a single tree, simplifying platform positioning from multi-tree lateral repositioning to single-tree stops. Compared to our prior horizontal dual-arm system, the platform integrates 5 advances: (1)a foundation-model-based perception pipeline combining Grounding-DINO and EfficientViT-SAM for robust fruit localization in unstructured outdoor environments; (2)7th-order jerk-bounded trajectory generation paired with a Control Barrier Function safety filter to achieve fast yet safe arm motions; (3)a linear sweep harvesting strategy with a 10cm approach buffer and rotational detachment that

MANHATTAN, Kan. — Drones are becoming an increasingly important tool for farmers seeking to improve efficiency and crop management, according to a Kansas State University precision agriculture expert. Deepak Joshi, a faculty member in K-State’s Department of Agronomy, said the growing use of drones in early-season crop scouting can help producers quickly assess plant germination, […] The post K-State Expert Says Drones Can Improve Crop Scouting, Reduce Labor appeared first on Morning Ag Clips.

MADISONVILLE, Ky. — A two-day drone pilot certification workshop and exam are being offered July 8-9 by the Kentucky Agriculture Training School (KATS), a program of the University of Kentucky Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment. According to KATS coordinator Lori Rogers, the workshop will prepare candidates for the certification required under the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Small […] The post FAA Certification Workshop and Exam for Agricultural Drone Pilots appeared first on Morning Ag Clips.

arXiv:2606.10971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Precise state estimation for navigation of autonomous agricultural robots is often compromised by sensor outages (GNSS/LiDAR/Visual) and high-frequency vibrations inherent in off-road environments. This paper proposes a robust navigation algorithm based on a jerk-augmented Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) integrated with a Multiple Tuning Factor (MTF) adaptation method. Unlike standard EKF approaches that assume constant measurement noise, our method dynamically adjusts the measurement covariance matrix in real-time, allowing the system to cope with sudden disturbances and sensor outliers. We evaluate the algorithm using real-world data from a Salin247 autonomous robot. Results demonstrate that jerk-augmentation combined with MTF adaptation significantly reduces 3D position Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) compared to baseline EKF models, providing superior dead-reckoning capabilities.

ONLINE — On the Uplevel Dairy Podcast, Peggy sits down with Sam Fessenden, a Cornell dairy science graduate with a PhD focused on the CNCPS model who worked with nutritionists globally before partnering with his wife Brenda and her parents, Craig and Cathy, to rebuild dairying at their Southeast Minnesota site. In this conversation, Sam […] The post Robots, Faith and Resilience: Transforming Tradition at Silver Spirit Farm appeared first on Morning Ag Clips.

A robot designed to detect and remove poisonous ragwort before it threatens livestock is being tested on farms across Dorset. The autonom...

We asked three farmers to tell us how new technology is revolutionizing the way they work.

We asked three farmers to tell us how new technology is revolutionizing the way they work.

We asked three farmers to tell us how new technology is revolutionizing the way they work.

Reservoir's Danny Bernstein discusses the evolution of farm robotics to multi-task, multi-crop machines and the role of VC in this space. The post Reservoir’s Danny Bernstein says we’re ‘entering the golden age of robotics’ in agriculture appeared first on AgFunderNews.

Researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University have developed a method for creating realistic virtual tomato farms that automatically generate data for training agricultural AI systems. Their approach offers a way to overcome one of the most labor-intensive tasks in farming: harvesting the crops.

arXiv:2605.28883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tropical forests worldwide are under intense deforestation pressure driven by economic and political interests, and scientific evidence suggests this deforestation contributes to climate change. This paper proposes a novel logging method for tropical forests, Ultra-Reduced-Impact-Encased-Logging (URIEL). This new method is based on heli-logging techniques combined with intensive use of robotics and AI integrated with post-harvest silvicultural treatments performed by drones. The concept of appropriate equipment for this method was developed, dimensions were determined, details were completed in a digital proof of concept, and an effective digital simulation and economic feasibility analysis were carried out for various helicopter-timber-distance combinations. The results demonstrated that a URIEL method has high economic viability and makes it possible to virtually eliminate collateral damage to forests while maintaining ecosystem

The potential for tariffs and an outright ban on Chinese drones is weighing heavily on ag users. The post Drones Unmade in China: Proposed U.S. Ban Clouds Future of Agricultural Spray Drone Industry appeared first on CropLife.

arXiv:2605.27129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In greenhouse tomato production, automated harvesting requires accurate detection of ripe tomatoes, ripeness classification, and precise picking-point localization for robotic end-effectors. This paper proposes YOLO26-RipeLoc Lite, a lightweight deep learning architecture based on YOLO26 for simultaneous detection, ripeness classification, and center-point localization of greenhouse tomatoes. The model introduces three modifications: (1) a Lightweight Feature Pyramid Network (LFPN) with depthwise separable convolutions for efficient multi-scale fusion, (2) a Ripeness-Aware Attention Module (RAAM) with dual pooling and a learnable ripeness bias vector for enhanced color-texture discrimination, and (3) a Compact Detection Head (CDH) with shared convolutions and an integrated center-point regression branch for direct grasp planning. The model is evaluated on a custom dataset of 1,500 images with 6,227 instances (3,566 ripe, 2,661 unripe)

arXiv:2605.25279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Greenhouse agriculture in the Mediterranean region faces significant automation challenges due to its unique structural and environmental constraints. These environments are characterized by extremely narrow aisles, heterogeneous terrains ranging from concrete to tilled soil and severe optical interference caused by polyethylene covers, which induce specular reflections and "ghost points" in depth sensors. While autonomous navigation is essential for digitizing agricultural tasks, traditional solutions often rely on expensive 3D LiDAR systems that are economically unscalable for most facilities. To address this, this paper presents GreenSeg, a robust perception framework for autonomous navigation using RGB-D sensing. The proposed method introduces a dual-layer validation strategy: a robust global plane fitting combined with a surface curvature filter for terrain adaptability, and a seed-point-based Region Growing constraint to ensure the

arXiv:2605.23863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study presents a closed-loop robotic strawberry harvesting system that combines a robust vision module, simulation-trained deep reinforcement learning (DRL) control, and ROS-based realrobot execution. For perception, we propose HRAttnEdge-YOLO26-seg, a modified YOLO26-seg architecture that incorporates a high-resolution P2 branch, segmentation-path attention, and edgesupervised prototype learning to improve instance segmentation in cluttered scenes. For control, we train a target-conditioned Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) policy in Isaac Lab to produce smooth joint-position commands for a UR10e manipulator and deploy it on a UR10e robot for targetfruit reaching and harvesting. This simulation-based approach reduces hardware dependency, lowers development cost, and allows scalable policy training without exhaustive physical trials before real deployment. The proposed vision model demonstrated the highest overall performance among

A Florida community deploys AI-powered robotic beehives to protect declining bee populations that pollinate roughly 75% of the crops Americans eat.

Agricultural drones are rapidly becoming mainstream on modern farms as growers look to reduce chemical use, cut labour costs and improve eff...

Autonomous raspberry-picking robots are set to be rolled out on UK farms after Fieldwork Robotics secured £3 million in funding to accelerat...

In the field of environmental science and agricultural resource management, the ability to accurately identify and map areas at risk of contributing to water pollution has long relied on cutting-edge, yet costly, technologies. A recent breakthrough led by researchers at Penn State University heralds a transformative shift in this domain, unveiling a novel, cost-effective approach […]

Environmental scientists and water resource managers need precise, high-resolution maps to reveal areas that farmers should avoid when planting crops, to limit polluting waters with phosphorus from fertilizer or manure. Making those maps has depended on an expensive, sometimes unavailable technology, but a team led by Penn State researchers has developed a cheaper approach that can be just as effective.

New spray drones boost capacity, autonomy, and efficiency, reshaping aerial application for custom applicators and ag retailers in 2026. The post 7 Agricultural Spray Drones to Watch in 2026 appeared first on CropLife.

"Farmers just want to know when it will pay off, what's the maintenance like, and how it will make or save me money," says Niqo Robotics CEO Jaisimha Rao. The post Niqo Robotics expands reach, targets profitability in 2026/7: ‘Farmers don’t want AI hype—they want ROI’ appeared first on AgFunderNews.

Though it's largely a hereditary trait, siblings often grow to be different heights. But even if they end up topping out at the same stature, they may take different paths to get there. As they progress through childhood, growth spurts can come at varying ages with varying intensities.