Introduction
We live in a world where everything can be
controlled and operated automatically, but there are still a few important
sectors in our country where automation has not been adopted or not been put to
a full-fledged use, perhaps because of several reasons one such reason is cost.
One such field is that of agriculture. Agriculture has been one of the primary
occupations of man since early civilizations and even today manual
interventions in farming are inevitable.
The idea of robotic agriculture (agricultural
environments serviced by smart machines) is not a new one. Many engineers have
developed driverless tractors in the past but they have not been successful as
they did not have the ability to embrace the complexity of the real world. Most
of them assumed an industrial style of farming where everything was known
before hand and the machines could work entirely in predefined ways – much like
a production line. The approach is now to develop smarter machines that are
intelligent enough to work in an unmodified or semi natural environment. These
machines do not have to be intelligent in the way we see people as intelligent
but must exhibit sensible behavior in recognised contexts. In this way they
should have enough intelligence embedded within them to behave sensibly for
long periods of time, unattended, in a semi-natural environment, whilst
carrying out a useful task. One way of understanding the complexity has been to
identify what people do in certain situations and decompose the actions into
machine control is called behavioral robotics
