Farming in the European Union is on the brink of the robot revolution with artificial intelligence and machines used to harvest, pick and prepare crops.
According to French agronomist Bertrand Pinel, the farming sector in Europe need to use robots more to be productive and stay competitive. This is to help with time consuming tasks such as weeding as well as to plug the gap of labour shortages currently experienced.
Pinel is a member of the ROBS4CROPS project with about 50 experts and 16 institutions who are pioneering robot technology on farms in Spain, the Netherlands, Greece and France.
They are looking at several uses of robots from crop protection, soil samples, harvesting to weeding and other manual tasks usually performed by humans.