Farm work is repetitive, seasonal and increasingly short of hands, which makes it a natural fit for robots. Agricultural robots can move through fields identifying individual plants, tending or harvesting them, or removing weeds mechanically rather than by spraying everything uniformly.
Working plant by plant can reduce the use of chemicals and handle delicate crops gently. The difficulty is the environment: outdoor conditions vary endlessly, plants differ from one another, and the ground is uneven, so a field robot must cope with far more variation than one in a controlled indoor setting.