Small Autonomous Machines for Sustainable Soil Management in Vegetable Crops and Orchards

In specialty crops, the interest in developing autonomous machines for weed management has grown significantly because of the decreased availability of effective herbicides, labor shortages, and high labor costs. Small autonomous mowers with random path planning, despite relaying on simplified computational resources, obtained promising results when applied in agricultural contexts, including vegetable systems, orchards and vineyards, even when compared with conventional systems. The intensive mowing activity of these mowers allows to control weeds growth and seed production, limiting their spread. These machines achieved also encouraging results for the management of living mulch, whose growth needs to be controlled to prevent competition with the cash crop. In addition, the use of these small autonomous mowers with random path planning showed to reduce the primary energy consumption and CO2 emissions of the management system, contributing to improve the sustainability of floor management. Nevertheless, further improvement of these machines is needed for the mechanization of a professional farm.