Robotic Spraying for Precision Crop Protection

Plant protection products play a strategic role in securing worldwide food production. Nevertheless, major societal concerns are raised about risks for the environment and humans, and are being addressed by policy actions for reducing the dependence of agriculture on pesticides. A primary contribution to this can come from precision crop protection approaches, with treatments tailored to the site and time-specific needs of protecting the crop from pest pressure and expected infestation spreading. Robotic systems can play a role in precision crop protection, both in accurate monitoring of plant conditions and in timely and selectively spraying the treatment targets. This chapter provides a comprehensive discussion of the state-of-art of robotic spraying, with a review of weed and disease sensing tasks, and of precision actuation of treatments. Despite the complexity of some of the problems ahead, the chapter shows how the building blocks of integrated robotic systems for precision crop protection are developing fast.