Toward a Robotic Platform for Precision Vineyard Operations

With the growing global demand for plant production, the agricultural sector faces the urgent challenge of developing innovative, efficient, and sustainable solutions. Within this context, innovative approaches are essential for advancing sustainable farming, addressing labor shortages, and enhancing a variety of tasks across the agricultural product life cycle. Concentrating on viticulture, this study incorporates direct feedback from end users, highlighting key needs: multifunctional robotic systems designed for precision tasks in grape production, and a particular focus on vineyard monitoring to enable selective interventions on individual grape clusters. This emphasis is driven by the fact that monitoring and maintenance activities extend throughout the year, a perspective strongly supported by practitioners in the field. This study explores the design, control, and evaluation of a multifunctional robotic system for precision agricultural tasks specific to vineyard environments, enabling precision agriculture through the accurate localization of individual grape clusters by integrating GPS data, onboard sensor information, and robot kinematics. The proposed platform combines custom and commercial components across three core modules: navigation, which includes path planning and obstacle avoidance; perception for detecting and localizing grape positions within the vineyard; and manipulation, enabling the robot to carry out inspections, targeted treatments, and interact with grape clusters. A user-friendly graphical interface is implemented to allow operators without robotics expertise to manage the software modules effortlessly and oversee task execution. Experimental validation was conducted in both artificial and real vineyard settings, demonstrating the potential of autonomous robotic platforms to promote more efficient and sustainable viticulture practices. Feedback from stakeholders are presented both in terms of initial needs specification and post-deployment outcomes, providing to the reader an idea on solutions and actions that can drive progress in this field.