New technical and operational solutions for the use of drones in Agriculture 4.0.

The main objective of this thesis was to study technical and operational solutions for the use of new Smart Farming Technologies like UGVs in the context of Agriculture 4.0. The scientific knowledge regarding UGVs, the farmer’s acceptance model, and the evaluation of performances of a specific terrestrial drone were evaluated. For what concerns the Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), the first approach relied on the customization of an existing robotic unit, to adapt it to the agricultural domain and enable it to autonomously perform specific paths, even within a vineyard. Moreover, the UGV was coupled with implements to carry out agricultural activities mainly aimed at weed management. The thesis consists of six chapters, which are described as follows. Chapter 1 highlighted future modernization and innovations, Agriculture 4.0, and the Technology Acceptance Model method. Chapter 2 showed the technical and operational characteristics of the XBOT in detail. Chapter 3 reported the evolution in time for the interest of the scientific community in “unmanned ground vehicles”. The growth noted through time, revealed the most common document types as well, subject areas, total number of publications, number of publications per year, and country. This study also revealed the technical specifications of the most studied UGVs by scientists as well as the number of publications per rover. Chapter 4 underlined on-field agricultural operations using XBOT coupled or not with a rotary tiller or a flail mower at 3 different forwarding speeds. Therefore, while using the tiller, bulk density was calculated to evaluate the quality of soil, while using the mower the percentage of cutting efficiency was assessed. In addition, the forward speed was also taken into consideration and calculated. The fifth chapter focused on the acceptance level of farmers to use UGVs in their activities. The factors related to the intention to use UGVs were explored and evaluated through the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Finally, the main findings of the thesis work are reported in Chapter 6. Finally, developing agricultural UGVs shall be a promising technology for future generations.