Co-creation and trust to address regulatory, ethical and interactional challenges in Digital Farming

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The prevalence of Digital Farming is growing with multi-robot systems, human-robot collaboration, and environment reconstruction and virtual farming systems. However, we are far from having fully automated farms, and there is still a need for making sure the interaction between human workers and robots or autonomous systems deployed in farms and fields is effective and successful. As with many situations where robots and humans may need to work closely, this presents us with regulatory, legal, ethical and interactional challenges. Up to date, studies have focussed on either exploring farm-level adoption of precision and digital farming, or on agent-based models on the diffusion of agricultural innovations. However, studies bringing together both the human and technological components are uncommon, and none have been found considering the aspects that this project focuses on, nor studies following a co-creation approach with stakeholders and en-users. These approaches have been used successfully in other areas (e.g., educational robotics, assistive robotics), but not in digital farming or agricultural robotics. This project aims to identify the main obstacles when it comes to the uptake of agricultural robots, and on how to improve the design of these and of their deployments, taking into consideration regulatory, legal, ethical, accessibility, and interaction related aspects. It will investigate the construct of trust in this area, exploring inhibitors and enablers that may help in creating an environment where trust levels are appropriate - avoiding under-trust and over-trust. It will be expected that the researcher will work closely with stakeholders and end-users from the beginning of this project, following a co-research and co-design approach. Expected objectives: Identify the main activity areas where the uptake of digital farming may be affected by regulatory, legal, ethical, or interactional challenges (e.g., harvesting, mapping and surveying, crop maintenance). Focussing on the main activity areas, identify the challenges that are more prevalent and co-design strategies/design choices to overcome them. Develop a design framework for the implementation of digital farming solutions in the main activity areas identified. Methodology: Co-creation with stakeholders (e.g., policy makers, industry representatives) and end-users (farm and field workers and managers) from the beginning of the project will be core to this project. Mixed-methods approaches, following a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods will be expected to be used in the various studies part of the PhD project (e.g., questionnaires, observation, focus groups, interviews, workshops).