Smart Agriculture Technology: A Review of Robotic Platforms, Sensing Modalities, Artificial Intelligence, Datasets, Evaluation Metrics, and Future Research Directions

Smart agriculture has moved beyond isolated precision-farming tools toward integrated cyber–physical systems that combine robotics, multimodal sensing, connectivity, artificial intelligence, and data-driven decision support. This review synthesizes recent developments in the field using a systematic critical review approach. It proposes a systems-level framework for analyzing smart agriculture across robotic platforms, sensing and digital infrastructure, AI methods, public datasets and benchmarks, evaluation metrics, application domains, and deployment maturity. The review covers ground robots, UAVs, harvesting manipulators, multi-robot systems, RGB and spectral sensing, LiDAR, IoT networks, edge/cloud platforms, AI-based perception and decision-making, and multimodal vision–language models. The analysis shows that the literature has made clear progress in prototypes, datasets, and task-specific performance, but several gaps still limit practical deployment. These include weak cross-season and cross-region validation, fragmented benchmarking practices, limited deployment-oriented metrics, insufficient techno-economic reporting, and unresolved challenges related to interoperability and human–robot interaction. Public datasets and emerging multimodal benchmarks show that the field is moving toward greater standardization; however, strong benchmark performance does not yet consistently translate into reliable field operation. The review concludes by outlining future research directions in benchmark realism, field-robust AI, edge deployment, digital twins, privacy-preserving learning, human-centered autonomy, and long-term agronomic and economic validation.