An Approach to Cooperative Human-Robot Teaming in Smart Agriculture

The advancement of the agricultural economic sec tor, which is a labour-intensive one, can benefit from robot-based systems, able to identify objects and perform complex processes in cooperation with human actors. From the technical, organiza tional, and job management viewpoint, cooperation in agriculture can also help facing challenges related to sustainability and climate change, and connected to aspects of the market such as global competition, labour shortages, and fluctuating costs of materials (e.g., fuel and fertilisers). Agricultural robots (agrobots) hold great promise in addressing the aforementioned challenges. Starting from ideas at the basis of our project at POLIMI on fruit farming, this paper presents a context study, and a knowledge based approach to model smart agricultural environments, where farms use sensors and agrobots, and cooperate via Digital Twins towards the execution of complex tasks. We discuss how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can enhance the process of training humans and agrobots in cooperative tasks.