Advances in connectivity and distributed intelligence in agricultural robotics

Robotics needs to evolve in capabilities for collaborative operations within farm worksites like fields and barns. Especially, from the viewpoint of smallholders, it is necessary to be able to use robots as a service. This, however, sets a demand for robots and their management systems to be able to adapt to customer farms’ diverse farm technology assets. The concept of Internet of Robotic Things defines robots as Internet of Things systems which exploit cloud services to increase calculation, data storage and analytics capacities, i.e. BigData analytics. The main advances in connectivity and distributed intelligence of robotic systems in agriculture are multi-robot systems that are capable to collaborate with other farm machinery, sensing and Farm Management Information Systems. They are enabled by low-latency communication networks, edge computing deploying Machine Learning and IoT data sources, and Data Space for creating needed data connections to versatile supporting services and data sources.