Agricultural Robots Market 

Agricultural Robotics is the logical proliferation of automation and cost-effective technology into biosystems such as agriculture, horticulture, and livestock. The market is valued at USD 3.42 billion in 2017 and is expected to register a CAGR of 21.1%.                                                                                                          

Robotics and automation are gradually gaining traction in the agricultural industry. The most common applications of robots in agricultural fields include aerial data collection, filed mapping, seeding, and planting, fertilizing and irrigation, intercultural operations, picking, and harvesting, while others including dairy farming activities like milking, and shepherding. According to the International Federation of Robotics, most of the market is mainly occupied by China, Republic of Korea, Japan, US, and Germany, accounting for 74% of the total supply.

Declining Availability of farm workers

Across the world, farmers are aging. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), agricultural laborers as a percentage of the workforce declined from 81.0% to 48.2% in developing countries and 35.0% to 4.2% in developed ones by 2014. The shortage of people working on farms is growing chronic everywhere. In the Asia Pacific, especially in Japan alone, the number of people working in farms dropped from 2.2 million in 2004 to 1.7 million in 2014. Such a huge decline in the workforce of about 12.8% is also observed in the European agriculture sector. Such decline for the workforce is observed due to lack of young people becoming farmers, finding it unattractive and skill shortages are encouraging farming automation technologies. 

Some of the major projects like GARotics (Green Asparagus Robotics Harvesting System), GRAPE (Ground Robot for vineyArd Monitoring and ProtEction), and MARS (Mobile Agricultural Robotic Swarms) were funded by the European Commission to replace the manual labor with automation technologies. In addition to this, several automations in agriculture were recorded like Hands-free hectare project in the UK, robot-based milking production in China, weed killing robots in Australia, owing to this robots in agriculture has a huge potential of traction in the near future.

Inability to match human dexterity

An agriculture machinery operator should perform two functions simultaneously namely steering the tractor and operating the agricultural machinery. As opposed to the industrial robots, agricultural robots are challenged by several complexities related to both robot navigation and agricultural task. Such difficulties derive from the fact that robots move in a structured environment, but moving on an unstructured environment involves several task uncertainties while dealing with highly variable objects like fruits, leaves, branches, which differ in size, shape, and color.  Although machine vision techniques are widespread these days, it would be costly in the context of agriculture. But owing to huge investments made by the government on the research of agricultural robots by leading experts like US, Europe, China, and Japan, which is on par with the huge scale of opportunities in the near future.       

Milking Robots dominate the Dairy Farming Segment

Milking robots are one of the most successful and important innovations in the dairy farming system. According to the International Federation of Robotics, Milking Robots occupy 85% share of field robots. The average sales of Milking Robots increased by about 9.4% between 2016 and 2017. Nearly 20,000 dairy farms have installed robots in Western Europe, Canada, US, China, and Japan. The factors like increased milking frequency and high labor flexibility are driving milking robots market.

Key Developments in Agricultural Robotics Market

• May 2018 – A new generation of milking robot is unveiled by Lely Company, called Lely Astronaut5, with over 2 million milkings in more than 7 countries throughout the world.
• January 2017 – Naio Technologies unveiled two new robots named Ted and Bob, which are designed to tackle weeds in Vineyards.

Agricultural Robots Market Major Players:

• Agrobot
• Blue River Technology
• Harvest Automation
• AGCO Corporation
• Lely Industries
• Naio Technologies
• Precision Hawk
• Deere & Company
• AG Eagle LLC
• Agribotix LLC
• Trimble
• IBM

Agricultural Robots Market Report Summmary

Reasons to Purchase Agricultural Robots Market Report

• To have an understanding of the fastest growing regions  in the soybean meal and growth trends during the forecast period
• The report outlines drives, restraints, and trends that are currently affecting the market
• Analyzing various perspectives of the market with the help of Porter’s five forces analysis
• The report covers in-detail insights into the competitors’ overview and company share analysis
• Identify the latest developments, market shares, and strategies employed by the major market players
• 3-month analyst support, along with the Market Estimate sheet (in Excel)

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