Scheduling Problems for Robotics in Precision Agriculture

Robotics is playing an increasingly important role in precision agriculture and agricultural technology because it allows to tackle some important problems at scale at a time when the agricultural workforce is declining. Robots can collect data that can better inform farmers on the best course of actions for their crops. Robots can also perform tasks that are too labor intensive for workers. Despite increased availability, however, these technologies will not become as so pervasive that each problem instance will be taken care of by robots and it is therefore important to carefully select which ones should be addressed and which ones can be deferred. Starting from these premises, in this overview paper we discuss a series of scheduling problems we developed that is pervasive in these applications.