Planting the Seeds of a Robot Revolution: How Autonomous Systems Are Integrating into Precision Agriculture

Precision agriculture aims to increase the efficiency of agricultural production. Robotic solutions offer an option to reducing dependence on human labor – but these technologies often create more issues than they solve. Agriculture robots can replace some – but not all – human labor in agriculture. Given their high price tags and the relative abundance of workers, many systems are not financially viable today. However, our analysis shows that decreasing technology costs coupled with increasing labor cost will make specific solutions more attractive in the future. Developers will need to work to aggressively decrease their technology costs while increasing the amount of human labor each device can replace in order to drive adoption of these solutions. Robotic solutions that are more general, and can replace more significant proportions of human tasks, will be best positioned for success.