Theoretical Foundations to Control Technological and Robotic Operations with Physical Manipulations of Agricultural Products

The chapter provides an overview of the tasks of control technological and robotic operations in agricultural production. The relevance of the research on robotization of agriculture problem is justified by the possibility of improving the quality of fresh fruits and vegetables, reducing production costs, reducing the labor shortage through the development and implementation of agricultural robots. A classification of agricultural grippers, which are installed on robotic agricultural equipment and are used for weed control and harvesting, has been compiled. Also the tasks of directional weeds spraying and pruning of branches and leaves, in which manipulators are involved, are mentioned. Examples of existing research agricultural robots equipped with combined grippers according to the proposed classification, related to various types are given: vacuum gripper with a video camera for grabbing tomatoes, a six-fingered pneumatic gripper with a video camera, a two-fingered grip with pressure and collision sensors for picking apples, a three-fingered gripper with a video camera for citrus fruits, eggplant grippers and others. Also the relevance of the joint interaction of a group of heterogeneous ground-based and air robots was noted, when performing agricultural tasks in an autonomous mode. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.