Abstract
Robotic platforms are being developed for precision agriculture, to execute repetitive and long term tasks. Autonomous monitoring, pruning, spraying and harvesting are some of these agricultural tasks, which requires an advanced path planning system aware of maximum robot capabilities (mobile platform and arms), terrain slopes and plant/fruits position. The state of the art path planning systems have two limitations: are not optimized for large regions and the path planning is not aware of agricultural tasks requirements. This work presents two solutions to overcome these limitations. It considers the VGR2TO (Vineyard Grid Map to Topological) approach to extract from a 2D grid map a topological map, to reduce the total amount of memory needed by the path planning algorithm and to reduce path search space. Besides, introduces an extension to the chosen algorithm, the Astar algorithm, to ensure a safe path and a maximum distance from the vine trees to enable robotic operations on the tree and its fruits.

Abstract
Metabolomics is paramount for precision agriculture. Knowing the metabolic state of the vine and its implication for grape quality is of outermost importance for viticulture and wine industry. The MetBots system is a metabolomics precision agriculture platform, for automated monitoring of vineyards, providing geo-referenced metabolic images that are correlated and interpreted by an artificial intelligence self-learning system for aiding precise viticultural practices. Results can further be used to analyze the plant metabolic response by genome-scale models. In this research, we introduce the system main components: (i) robotic platform; (ii) autonomous navigation; (iii) sampling arm manipulation; (iv) spectroscopy systems; and (v) non-invasive, real-time metabolic hyper-spectral imaging monitoring of vineyards. The full potential of the Metbots system is revealed when metabolic data and images are analyzed by big data AI and systems biology vine plant models, establishing a new age of molecular biology precision agriculture. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

Abstract
Labour shortage is a reality in agriculture. Farmers are asking for solutions to automate agronomic tasks, such as monitoring, pruning, spraying, and harvesting. The automation of these tasks requires, most of the time, the use of robotic arms to mimic human arms capabilities. The current robotic arm based solutions available, both in the market and in the scientific sphere, have several limitations, such as, low-speed manipulation, the path planning algorithms are not aware of the requirements of the agricultural tasks (robotic motion and manipulation synchronisation), and require active perception tuning to the end-target point. This work benchmarks algorithms from open manipulation planning library (OMPL) considering a cost-effective six-degree freedom manipulator in a simulated vineyard. The OMPL planners shown a very low performance under demanding pruning tasks. The best and most promising results are performed and obtained by BiTRRT. However, further work is needed to increase its performance and reduce planning time. This benchmark work helps the reader to understand the limitations of each algorithm and when to use them. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
The world's population is estimated to reach nine billion people by the year 2050, which indicates that agricultural productivity must increase sustainably. The mechanisation and automatisation of agricultural tasks is an essential step to face population growth. Ground robots have been developed along the last decade for several agricultural applications, being, the autonomous and safe navigation one of the hardest challenge in this development. Moving autonomously, a mobile platform involves different tasks, such as localisation, mapping, motion control, and path planning, a crucial step for autonomous operations. This article performs a survey of different applications for path planning techniques applied to various agricultural contexts. This paper analyses different agricultural applications and details about the employed path planning method. The conclusion indicates that path planning has been successfully applied to agrarian robots for field coverage and point-to-point navigation, being that coverage path planning is slightly more advanced in this field.

Abstract
A robots simulation system is a basis need for any robotics application. With it, developers teams of robots can test their algorithms and make initial calibrations without risk of damage to the real robots, assuring safety. However, build these simulation environments is usually a time-consuming work, and when considering robot fleets, the simulation reveals to be computing expensive. With it, developers building teams of robots can test their algorithms and make initial calibrations without risk of damage to the real robots, assuring safety. An omnidirectional robot from the 5DPO robotics soccer team served to test this approach. The modeling issue was divided into two steps: modeling the motor's non-linear features and modeling the general behavior of the robot. A proper fitting of the robot was reached, considering the velocity robot's response.

Abstract
The increase of the world population and a decrease in agricultural labour availability have motivated research robotics in the agricultural field. This paper aims to analyze the state of the art related to manipulators used in the agricultural robotics field. Two pruning and seven harvesting manipulators were reviewed and are analyzed. The pruning manipulators were used in two different scenarios: (i) grapevines and (ii) apple trees. These manipulators showed that a light-controlled environment could reduce visual errors and that prismatic joints on the manipulator are advantageous to obtain a higher reach. The harvesting manipulators were used for 5 different products: (i) strawberries, (ii) tomatoes, (iii) apples, (iv) sweet-peppers and (v) iceberg lettuce. The harvesting manipulators showed that a different kinematic configuration is required for different end-effectors, as some end-effectors only require horizontal movements and others require more degrees of freedom to reach and grasp the target. This work will support new developments of novel solutions related to agricultural robotic grasping and manipulation.