Robotic Assistance in Vertical Farming

The variations and demand for food commodities is ever-increasing, and that leads to attention of authorities toward supply-chain process for suburban and central urban areas. Much of the agricultural production in India occurs in rural areas. Due to this, the produce needs to be transported to urban areas where there is a higher demand for food commodities because of the larger population. As agricultural produce is a perishable commodity, this often results in degradation of quality of the products before reaching the destination. Both these factors have led to development of commercial agriculture near urban areas. A new concept called vertical farming is being explored and researched to modernize agriculture. Vertical farming is a concept that utilizes the third dimension of space in the vertical direction to increase the number of crops that can be cultivated in a certain area. In vertical farming, the plants are kept in pipes or trays stacked on top of each other. The peculiarity is that the pipes or trays do not contain soil, as opposed to traditional farming where the crops are grown in soil. In vertical farming, the contents of the pipes depend on the nutrient supply mechanism. There are three types of such mechanisms: hydroponics, aquaponics, and aeroponics. Generally, the setup is in a closed space with environmental conditions like light, temperature, and humidity controlled artificially. This forms another advantage of vertical farming, i.e., the plants can be grown independent of weather or climate conditions. For realization of agricultural practices on high-rise vertical farms, where human intervention is quite laborious, robotic assistance would be an effective solution. The agricultural processes like seeding, transplanting, harvesting, health-monitoring, and nutrient–water supply can be planned for robotic assistance. However, the requirements and complexities of these tasks to be performed are different, such as reach, orientation, payload capacity, and even end-effect or types required for each process. In addition to this, complexities can arise from variation in the amount of clutter due to a difference in the plants’ height. In such cases, an individual robotic configuration may not serve all the purposes; rather, each task may require a different configuration, planning strategies, and/or maintenance skills. Purchasing a large number of robotic systems, as per requirement, is never economical in the agricultural field, which is a bottleneck in the utilization of robotic assistance in farming. This chapter would cover the general utilization of robotic systems in agricultural processes, importance, and challenges in vertical farming and utilization of robotic assistance in all major processes. Besides, this chapter would also cover the possible solutions for handling the challenges of vertical farms through reconfigurable robotic systems.