Techno-economic and environmental assessment of next-generation battery-powered farming robots.

Modeling a small autonomous battery-powered agricultural robot for cradle-to-farm-gate production of strawberries, onions, lettuce, and peanuts shows costs from 76% below to 17% above reference ranges.

• Why it matters: Decarbonizing agriculture while maintaining productivity is hard amid rising input costs and labor scarcity, and system-level economic and environmental impacts of ABARs are not well quantified.
• What they did: They combined total cost of ownership with life cycle assessment across organic and non-organic management scenarios for the four crops, benchmarking against literature-based reference ranges.
• The result: Greenhouse-gas emissions fall within or below reported ranges, and variable inputs drive 72–90% of costs and 72–95% of global-warming impacts, implying ABAR value hinges on reducing input use and labor demand.

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