AUTOMATION AND ROBOT APPLICATION IN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIONS AND BIO-INDUSTRIES

Engineering of automated tools for the agro-food industries and the rural world activities have to pick up two challenges : to answer the immediate important problems related to the situation of these industries, and to imaging the tools that their professional will need next century. Creating or modifying automated tools in the next few will be made taking into account parameters either technical (environmental protection, health and safety), or social and economical (investment , employment). There will be a strong interaction with disciplines like ecology, medicine, ergonomy, psycho-sociology , etc. , The partners for such a research, tools manufactures and users, should have an early involvement in its content, in order to find rapidly the solution to the drastic problems they are meeting. On a longer term , during the next 20 years , there will be an important evolution of the rural space management and of the food processes. This will imply the emergence of new types of activities and know-how's , with lines of automated tools to be invented and developed , like : micro-system for organic localized tasks -mobile and adaptive equipments highly autonomous for natural space actions - device for perception , decision and control reproducing automatically the expert behaviors of human operators. Design of such automated tools need to overcome technological difficulties like the automation of the expert-decision process, or the management of complex design.