A Survey of Robotic Harvesting Systems and Enabling Technologies.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of ground agricultural robotic systems and applications with special focus on harvesting that span research and commercial products and results, as well as their enabling technologies. The majority of literature concerns the development of crop detection, field navigation via vision and their related challenges. Health monitoring, yield estimation, water status inspection, seed planting and weed removal are frequently encountered tasks.

Neuro-adaptive force/position control with prescribed performance and guaranteed contact maintenance.

In this paper, we address unresolved issues in robot force/position tracking including the concurrent satisfaction of contact maintenance, lack of overshoot, desired speed of response, as well as accuracy level. The control objective is satisfied under uncertainties in the force deformation model and disturbances acting at the joints. The unknown nonlinearities that arise owing to the uncertainties in the force deformation model are approximated by a neural network linear in the weights and it is proven that the neural network approximation holds for all time irrespective of the magnitude of the modeling error, the disturbances, and the controller gains.