Factors that Affect Acceptance of Agricultural Related Robotic or Wearable Technology by Agricultural Stakeholders: A Pilot Survey

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The agriculture field is increasingly adopting new technologies of precision agriculture systems. Among them, agricultural robots (ARs) and wearable technologies (WT) have the potential to help agricultural stakeholders to automate certain tasks and augment their capabilities, respectively. This potential does not guarantee their successful adoption though. The factors that are related to eventual adoption could be influenced by technology type as different technologies elicit different responses from stakeholders. Not considering the differences that are caused by stakeholder type could cause only part of the workforce to adopt the technology. Additionally, not all applications of a technology will be viewed equally as stakeholders might have a preference towards certain applications. To explore the extent of these issues, we deployed a technology acceptance survey to 61 agricultural stakeholders. The results indicated the performance expectancy (PE), compatibility, trust, trialability, social influence, and technological had medium to strong levels of correlation with the intention to use for both ARs and WT, while ARs had need for support and technological interest as additional constructs that were correlated. PE was significantly different between technologies with ARs being higher than WT. Engineers compared to agricultural workers had more general technological interest and competency and this was reflected in their lower expectancy and higher proactiveness scores. Harvesting was the most preferred application for robots whereas pollination scored the lowest in willingness to adopt.