Toward Smart Farming 4.0 and Digital Farming

Toward Smart Farming 4.0 and Digital Farming: Challenges and Opportunities in Agricultural Robotics

Workshop at the 23rd International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR 2026)
Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2026
Time: 13:00–17:30 JST
Venue: Ritsumeikan University, Osaka Ibaraki Campus, Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan
Room capacity: Approximately 40 participants
Conference website: UR 2026

Overview

Agriculture is rapidly transitioning toward Smart Farming 4.0 and digital farming, where robotics is expected to contribute not only to the automation of individual tasks but also to broader connected, data-driven, and adaptive production systems.

This workshop will provide a focused forum for discussing the technical, translational, and systems-level challenges that must be addressed to make agricultural robotics dependable and scalable in real production environments. Topics will span task-level robotic problems and system-level digital farming questions, including perception and manipulation, worker-assist and collaborative robots, autonomous field and greenhouse operations, digital twins, long-term monitoring, and predictive farm decision support.

News

  • Workshop accepted at UR 2026.
  • Short paper submissions is open.
    Submission deadline: June 20, 2026, 23:59 AoE**
    Submission method: Please email to chpark@gwu.edu with the title “UR2026 Smart Farming Workshop Submission (type) - (Your Name)” with the required information as above.

Call for Short Papers

We invite short papers, extended abstracts, work-in-progress reports, position papers, dataset/system descriptions, and field deployment reports related to agricultural robotics and digital farming.

  • Length: 2–4 pages, including references
  • Format: IEEE conference paper format
  • File type: PDF
  • Submission method: Please email to chpark@gwu.edu with the title “UR2026 Smart Farming Workshop Submission (type) - (Your Name)” with the required information as above.
  • Review: Light peer review by the workshop organizers and program committee
  • Presentation format: Accepted submissions may be invited for short spotlight talks, posters, or discussion presentations depending on the final program structure.

See the Call for Short Papers page for details.

Workshop Objectives

The workshop aims to:

  1. Identify major technical bottlenecks in agricultural robotics, especially in perception, manipulation, navigation, and generalization across crops, seasons, and sites.
  2. Bridge robotics and digital farming communities by discussing how robots can function as physical agents within broader smart farming and digital twin ecosystems.
  3. Highlight translational issues including reliability, safety, scalability, interoperability, labor interaction, and economic feasibility.
  4. Promote interdisciplinary dialogue among robotics researchers, AI scientists, agricultural engineers, crop scientists, and agri-tech practitioners.
  5. Develop a forward-looking research roadmap for dependable and scalable agricultural robotic systems.

Topics of Interest

Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Robotic harvesting and selective picking
  • Worker-assist and collaborative robots for agriculture
  • Perception, localization, and manipulation in unstructured agricultural environments
  • Autonomous and semi-autonomous greenhouse and field operations
  • Multi-modal sensing for crop, fruit, and field monitoring
  • Human–robot collaboration, supervision, and teleoperation in agriculture
  • Agricultural robot learning, adaptation, and generalization
  • Long-term crop monitoring and time-series analytics
  • Digital twins and robot-enabled digital farming systems
  • Robotic systems for disease detection, stress detection, and decision support
  • Scalable deployment and interoperability with farm management systems
  • Safety, robustness, usability, and economic feasibility in production settings

Intended Audience

This workshop is intended for researchers, students, practitioners, and industry participants working in robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence, human–robot interaction, autonomous systems, agricultural engineering, smart farming, precision agriculture, and agri-tech commercialization.

Important Dates

Item Date
Short paper submission opens May 20, 2026
Short paper submission deadline June 20, 2026
Acceptance notification June 25, 2026
Final materials due June 30, 2026
Workshop July 15, 2026, 13:00–17:30 JST

Organizers

  • Yonghyun Kim, George Washington University
  • Ki-Beom Lee, National Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Rural Development Administration, Republic of Korea
  • Chung Hyuk Park, George Washington University

Contact

For questions, please contact:

Workshop organizers: Primary contact: chpark@gwu.edu General inquiries: yonghyun.kim@gwu.edu

Acknowledgment

This workshop is accepted as part of the 23rd International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR 2026), July 15–18, 2026, at Ritsumeikan University, Osaka Ibaraki Campus, Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan.