Robotic Assessment of a Crop’s Need for Watering: Automating a Time-Consuming Task to Support Sustainable Agriculture

Agricultural robotics and automation technology plays an increasingly critical role across several crop production stages to improve sustainability (e.g., water use optimization). Robotics has been applied for remote and proximal sensing as well as physical sampling. The procedure of physical sampling and follow-on analysis of plant specimens, such as leaves or shoots, which is the focus of this work, often constitutes the only accurate way to measure some essential parameters that affect crop production, such as stem water potential (SWP), which helps determine a crop’s need for watering.