Agricultural Robots and Drones 2022-2032: Technologies, Markets & Players

As agricultural labour becomes increasingly costly and scarce, something exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis, attention is increasingly turning towards robotics as a key component of agricultural production.

 

This report from IDTechEx provides a technical and commercial analysis of the growing market for agricultural robotics, considering both the key application areas and enabling technologies underpinning the industry. The report also provides ten-year application-based and regional market forecasts for the future of the agricultural robotics industry.

 

Agricultural robotics are increasingly attracting interest as a potential solution to the sustainability and labour issues facing global agriculture. In recent years, agricultural labour has steadily become costlier and scarcer, particularly following the border closures and worker travel restrictions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, further squeezing farmers' margins and threatening food security across the world.

 

Automation could help mitigate this. Over the last decade, advances in robotics technology and artificial intelligence (AI) have made the use of farming robots an increasingly viable option. Across the world, a range of start-ups and established companies are working to develop robotic solutions for a number of agricultural tasks, including weeding, seeding, and harvesting.

 

Agricultural Robots and Drones 2022-2032, a report from IDTechEx, provides a comprehensive overview of agricultural robotics, focusing on the key application areas of agricultural robotics, the enabling technologies that are underpinning the growth of the industry, and the market factors that will shape the future of the field. The report also provides a ten-year market forecast for the future of the agricultural robotics industry, broken down by regional market share and by application area, predicting that the global agricultural robotics market will be worth $6.7 billion by 2032.

 

The IDTechEx report divides the global agricultural robotics industry into eight key application areas: weeding robots, seeding robots, autonomous tractors, autonomous implement carriers and platform robots, robotic harvesting, agricultural drones, milking robots, and other applications of agricultural robots. Key enabling technologies considered include RTK-GPS, LiDAR, artificial intelligence (AI), hyperspectral imaging, end effector technology, and precision spraying technology.

 

The day-to-day operation of a farm involves a range of repetitive, time-consuming, and dangerous tasks that could be well suited to automation using robotics. Automation is already widespread in some of these tasks. Robotic milking, for example, is already a billion-dollar industry with a significant percentage of farms in Europe using a form of robotic milking. Agricultural drones are also beginning to find widespread application in imaging and spraying, although regulations continue to limit their usage across much of the world and autonomy of tasks remains somewhat limited. Nevertheless, the market for agricultural drones is expected to show strong growth over much of the next decade.

 

Other applications are still emerging. Field robots for tasks such as weeding and seeding are entering the early stages of commercialisation. Compared with milking robots, which are stationary robots that generally operate indoors, developing autonomous field robots presents several technical challenges that have historically limited progress. Agricultural environments often feature unpredictable terrain, unknown obstacles, and a range of weather conditions that can impair autonomous navigation and operation and limit reliability. Additionally, agricultural regions are often in highly rural areas, where connectivity and access to repair and maintenance services can be limited.

 

Despite this, progress is being made and advances in artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and positioning technologies have brought field robots closer than ever to commercialisation. Start-ups such as Naïo Technologies, ecoRobotix, and TerraClear have begun commercialising robots for a diverse range of agricultural tasks, while major equipment providers such as John Deere, AGCO, and Kubota have developed autonomous tractor concepts. The Fendt MARS project provided a glimpse into the future of farm robots, using a swarm of small, autonomous robots to carry out tasks usually performed by manned tractors, with the company using the results of this project to develop its Xaver line of agricultural robots. Looking further into the future, companies such as Octinion, Harvest CROO, and FFRobotics are developing robots for harvesting fresh fruit, something that currently involves costly and difficult-to-source labour but is very difficult to replace using robots, requiring a careful balance of computer vision, accurate positioning, and soft-grip technology.

 

 

The growth of the agricultural robotics industry has also led to debate around the best business models, particularly around robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) versus traditional equipment sale. In a robotics-as-a-service model, robots are hired by farms, alongside trained operators, vs. traditional machine/equipment sales. This can help de-risk the operation for farmers, avoiding the need to meet high upfront costs or develop expertise in the technology before deployment. However, it also requires a team of trained operators, which can prevent developers from operating in new geographies and limit scalability. There are also questions around the issue of data ownership and whether data belongs to farmers, data collectors, technology providers, or landowners. Regulations around this have not yet caught up with the pace of technology development and this is a key uncertainty over the future of the agricultural robotics industry.

 

Developments over the next few years are set to play a pivotal role in the progress of the agricultural robotics industry. Agricultural Robots and Drones 2022-2032, a report from IDTechEx, explores all of these issues, analysing both the technological and market factors that will shape the future of the emerging industry around farming robots, providing ten-year market forecasts broken down by region and application area.

Report Metrics	Details
CAGR	The global market for agricultural robotics will reach $7.88 billion by 2032. This represents a CAGR is 13.09% compared with 2022.
Forecast Period	2022-2032
Forecast Units	Millions of US dollars
Segments Covered	Weeding robots, seeding robots, autonomous tractors, robotic implement carriers and platform robots, robotic harvesting, agricultural drones, milking robots

All report purchases include up to 30 minutes telephone time with an expert analyst who will help you link key findings in the report to the business issues you're addressing. This needs to be used within three months of purchasing the report.

If you have any questions about this report, please do not hesitate to contact our report team at research@IDTechEx.com or call one of our sales managers:

AMERICAS (USA): +1 617 577 7890

ASIA (Japan): +81 3 3216 7209

ASIA: +82 10 3896 6219

EUROPE (UK) +44 1223 812300