Assistive ‘Mother-Daughter’ Robots in Agriculture

Although research on assistive robotics in agriculture has commenced to a limited extent in recent past, the essence of such developments was limited to solo robot, seldom bio-inspired. The concept of team robots having near-identical features, symbolizing biological offspring, was never explored in application manifolds pertaining to agriculture. We attempt to provide a novel assistive robotic system having ‘Mother’ and ‘Daughter(s)’ for use in agricultural fields. Our design has been nucleated from a famous biological worm, namely, Caenorhabditis elegans ( C. elegans ) that has a fully developed reproductive system, notwithstanding its length (~1 mm.) or even the diameter (~50 μm). In this chapter, we will report the technological concept designs of a representative ‘Mother-Daughter’ Worm Robotic system by naturally inheriting the reproductive mechanism of the biological C. elegans worm (barring the size effect). The said worm robot will be poised to perform various tedious jobs in an agricultural field, such as spraying pesticides and manure and/or general observation on the crop’s growth.