As we suggest in our text, the trade off between labor and capital investment is ongoing.
The growing demand for food supply that derives from the continuously increasing population has made agricultural productivity growth an important priority. Labor availability pressure driven by demographics of an aging population, increasing urbanization, climate change and land degradation, as well as certain limitations regarding the arable land availability push forward slowly but steadily, the use of advanced agricultural technologies.
Incorporating such technologies into agricultural production benefits the overall productivity and in turn supports the economic development and growth. (For details, see this new 29 page report titled “A Survey of Robotic Harvesting Systems and Enabling Technologies.”) Additionally, automation in agriculture helps improve the difficult work conditions of farmers and agricultural workers that are generally linked to various musculoskeletal disorders.
Functionalities and hardware typically required by an operating agricultural robot harvester include: (a) vision systems, (b) motion planning/navigation methodologies (for the robotic platform and/or arm), (c) Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) strategies with 3D visualization, (d) system operation planning and grasping strategies and (e) robotic end-effector/gripper design.
Application of robotic solutions for crop monitoring and harvesting has significant beneficial effects on production profits, enabling faster and easier automated harvest and increasing crop quality and yield. So the development of robotic technologies and their application in agriculture is becoming a growing topic of operations management interest.
Classroom discussion questions:
- Summarize some of the applications noted in this video and report.
- Why is this an operations management issue?