Farmers have never been renowned for their ability to take on new forms of technology in comparison to other industries, however, this will all change as data acquisition, agricultural robotics and analytic companies grow.

According to a report from technological research company IDTechEx, many agricultural robotic companies are graduating into the market and are in the process of transforming the value chain of agriculture.

The report, titled 'Agricultural Robots and Drones 2017-2027: Technologies, Markets, Players', shows the investment in nearly 40 select farm data management and analytics companies.

It claims that, contrary to popular opinion, agriculture is at the forefront of technology in some areas and demand has increased over the past three years.

Taking autonomous driving as an example, GPS-enabled autonomous tractors have been in use for years in farming, with the report highlighting that the number of GPS-enabled assets in farming will rise to nearly 1m by 2024.

To set this in context, this figure was only 107,000 in 2006 and was nearly 430,000 in 2016 (this includes autosteer, tractor guidance, VRT equipment).

IDTechEx also forecasts that agricultural robots will become a $12bn industry by 2027 and predicts sensor-equipped agricultural robots will autonomously navigate through farms, continuously building up a detailed spatial map of data about specific plants.

An example of such technology can be seen at the agricultural college Harper Adams University. It has successfully drilled an agricultural test site with a self-driving tractor. And in the coming weeks, the project hopes to become the first in the world to plant, tend and harvest a crop by only using autonomous vehicles.

Drones are currently being developed which could detect plant diseases before any visible signs begin to show.

The report says that agricultural machinery may have to undergo a fundamental transfiguration to achieve autonomous machinery: large, fast, and heavy manned machine may have to be replaced with small, slow, and light autonomous robots.

In parallel to agricultural robotics, wireless sensing networks are also finding a receptive market in agriculture.

Agricultural robotics can help increase the resolution of the data, elevating the precision levels from a specific farm patch towards specific plants.

For example, a team of researchers are using a pair of robotics platforms and a $20m grant from the US National Science Foundation to develop a system for identifying crop strains resistant to heat, drought and flood.