An Extensive Review of Mobile Agricultural Robotics for Field Operations: Focus on Cotton Harvesting

In this review, we examine opportunities and challenges for 21st-century robotic agricultural cotton harvesting research and commercial development. The paper reviews opportunities present in the agricultural robotics industry, and a detailed analysis is conducted for the cotton harvesting robot industry. The review is divided into four sections: (1) general agricultural robotic operations, where we check the current robotic technologies in agriculture; (2) opportunities and advances in related robotic harvesting fields, which is focused on investigating robotic harvesting technologies; (3) status and progress in cotton harvesting robot research, which concentrates on the current research and technology development in cotton harvesting robots; and (4) challenges in commercial deployment of agricultural robots, where challenges to commercializing and using these robots are reviewed. Conclusions are drawn about cotton harvesting robot research and the potential of multipurpose robotic operations in general. The development of multipurpose robots that can do multiple operations on different crops to increase the value of the robots is discussed. In each of the sections except the conclusion, the analysis is divided into four robotic system categories; mobility and steering, sensing and localization, path planning, and robotic manipulation.