Robotic weeding and automated weed measurements

The goal of decreasing herbicide usage has so far focused on reducing the herbicide dosage or replacing chemical weed control by hoeing and harrowing. The conventional weed control strategy is to apply the same dose of herbicide or the same intensity of hoeing and harrowing in the whole field. The strategy may be changed in the coming years because experiments in Germany, USA, Australia, and Denmark have shown that site-specific weed management can reduce herbicide usage significantly. One of the promising technologies for site specific weed management is robotic weeding. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of automated weed measurement methods and the research projects concerning autonomous platform and information system for crop and weed monitoring and robotic weeding.