Robotics for work and environment safety in greenhouse

Robotics and automation are now widely diffused in most industrial sectors with consequent benefits both in terms of productivity and quality of products and regarding work quality and safety. Robotic systems are not yet diffused in agriculture even in those contexts in which automation is already presented, such as greenhouses. Most operations on crops, in fact, are still usually performed by human operators, often exposed to polluting substances. The introduction of fully automatic machines in agriculture would significantly improve the safety of the working environments and would allow the introduction of new low environmental impact techniques. Precise application of chemicals and herbicides would considerably reduce their use as well as a mechanical weed control. Different motivations, connected to the particular characteristics of the agricultural context, have strongly set back the development of robotics in this sector so far. The reasons that prevented the diffusion of robotic solutions in agriculture are discussed in this work, together a number of guidelines that, in the authors opinion, should be followed to design really usefully robot for agriculture applications. Two different multi-purpose robotic cells prototypes, designed and implemented according to such features, are then presented. First of them was conceived to operate in fixed position along a benches displacement line, while the second was a Cartesian tool handler which can be installed in different configurations for its movement within a greenhouse. Both robotic cells were able to perform different operations on pot crops by means simple tools implemented during the research activity.