After Chicago 2002 (Zhang, 2002) and Kyoto 2004 (Zhang et al., 2004), the third conference on
“Automation Technology for Off-Road Equipment” (ATOE) was held 2006 in Bonn. According
to the custom, again it was a pre-conference of a large CIGR event, the CIGR World Congress
2006. This allowed a reduction of expenditures for all participants, and also placed appropriate
emphasis on automation in the off-road area as it is seen as a major topic for land use and
agricultural technology today and in future.
More than 110 participants from 13 different countries clearly showed the importance of the
young ATOE conference. A total of 49 papers were reviewed by the scientific review committee
and were consistently of high quality. All papers were published in the 3rd ATOE proceedings
(Rothmund et al., 2006) and were available at the conference. However, due to the high interest
on this topic, the proceedings were out of print shortly after the conference.
Without any doubt, the ATOE 2006 conference provided a sound foundation for the future of
automation in the off-road area. But there is much additional work necessary to make reliable
and smart automated systems widely available and affordable. Many new ideas must be born and
a lot of open questions need to be answered to reach “Robot Farming” in the future. Therefore, it
is necessary to advance the still young ATOE conference. We expect ATOE 2008 to be realized
on a two-year-cycle in order to continue and strengthen the achievements of the past.