# Preliminary Examination of Emergent Threat and Risk Landscapes in Intelligent Harvesting Robots
## 1 Introduction  
In the last few years, there has been a growing effort to deploy robots in our environment to perform our daily tasks. From assistance and entertainment robots used in homes [1], to those working in assembly lines in industry [2] and all the way to those deployed in military [3] and professional facilities. For industrial applications, data show that the operational stock of industrial robots has tripled over the past decade, with more than three million robots in use across various industries [4]. In agriculture, robots are used due to their efficient and increased performance in reducing manpower and resource consumption [5]. This is interesting as worker shortage became a significant issue with COVID-19: travel restrictions, lock-downs and soaring wage costs pushed many farmers to turn to machines as an alternative, as is the case in Italian vineyards [6].  
This increased reliance on agricultural robots in the post-COVID-19 era comes with security implications that need to be considered. On one hand, while there has been a decent effort in the research community to assess security in robotics [7, 8], data show that there is still work to be conducted in this area. A recently published technical report about adversarial activity per section in 2021 [9] shows that most security researchers focus on assessing vulnerabilities in websites (96%), APIs (50%) and android (29%) amongst other technologies. On the other hand, existing research only looks at security in robotics on a general setting deployed in a general environment. While this will certainly lead to identifying threats, the complexity and impact of each threat varies from one environment to another. In other words, the same vector will have a significantly different impact if the targeted robot is used to carry out teleoperated surgical operations compared to another used for manufacturing [10]. Finally, research in intelligent farming tends to focus more on physical threats, IoT threats and, more generally, threats against informationand communication technologies without considering the presence of intelligent robots in this ecosystem [11]. This paper examines the security threats to intelligent harvesting robots while considering all the key components involved in this operation. It presents the following main findings:  
* an overview of the key components of intelligent harvest architecture and an in-depth analysis of safety and security challenges;
* presentation of potential adversarial scenarios as use cases that link between system vulnerabilities, Al-specific vulnerabilities and hardware challenges in intelligent harvesting robots;
* an assessment of the potential impact of the identified use cases from an operational and financial perspective.  
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 examines the related work of the security and safety issues of robots in other fields. In Section 3, we present the architecture of intelligent harvesting robots with the key components. In Section 4, we present the identified security and safety threats in robots used in intelligent harvesting. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 6.