Micromachines in Agriculture: Current Trends and Perspectives

A special issue of Micromachines (ISSN 2072-666X). This special issue belongs to the section "E:Engineering and Technology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2022) | Viewed by 7109

Special Issue Editors

Department of Natural Resources Development and Agricultural Engineering, School of Environment and Agricultural Engineering, Agricultural University of Athens, 75 Iera Odos Street, 11855 Athens, Greece
Interests: IoT networks; artificial intelligence; embedded systems; robotics; innovative systems in agriculture; engineering education
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Department of Natural Resources Development and Agricultural Engineering, School of Environment and Agricultural Engineering, Agricultural University of Athens, 75 Iera Odos Street, 11855 Athens, Greece
Interests: process control; computational intelligence; automation in agriculture; wireless sensor networks; microgrids’ management
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Due to rapid development in the electronics industry, many devices with amazing characteristics have been made available at very affordable costs and this has further boosted innovation in ICT technologies. This potential is being welcomed by the agricultural sector that seeks effective methods to tackle the depletion of natural resources and to cover the nutritional needs of the earth’s growing population.

In this regard, the engineering solutions are progressively moving from larger conventional machines to smaller ones, that are becoming more affordable, flexible, and smart, and are having a reduced environmental footprint, mainly reducing energy requirements and freeing farmers valuable time. These agricultural machines can be equipped with edge computing functionality and assisted by renewable energy sources, to eliminate their needs. New technologies like augmented reality and digital twins can facilitate the control of these tiny systems, which often work in swarms. These micromachines include both micro-ground vehicles, as well as micro aerial vehicles (micro-drones). Every type of machine destined for micro-scale agricultural purposes can be seen in crop production, livestock farming, aquaculture, gardening, and forestry. These machines can range from tiny vehicles to grafting robots, weeding robots, spraying robots, precision monitoring of crops and animal health, harvesting robots for specialty crops, pruning robots, livestock feeding robots, and livestock cleaning robots to water quality assessment robots in aquaculture farming.

This Special Issue will provide a platform for researchers to discuss and present their innovative work about the extent to which the limits of this “the smaller the better” approach can be further shifted, in terms of autonomy, connectivity, efficiency, intelligence, reliability, sustainability, ease of control, and cost.

We invite you to contribute to this Issue by submitting comprehensive reviews, case studies, or research articles that focus on scientific methods, technological tools, application studies, and innovative statistical analyses, to provide an opportunity for learning the state-of-the-art and for the discussion of future directions in micromachines for the agricultural domain. Papers selected for this Special Issue are subject to a rigorous peer-review procedure with the aim of the rapid and wide dissemination of research results, developments, and applications.

Dr. Dimitrios Loukatos
Prof. Dr. Konstantinos G. Arvanitis
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Spyros Fountas
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Micromachines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Potential topics include, but are not limited to the following:

  • Paradigms and motivations for small, even tiny, agricultural machines
  • Robots for crop production, livestock farming, aquaculture, forestry, and gardening
  • Modeling the energy requirements of micromachines in agriculture
  • Microgrids and sustainability approaches for tiny agri-robots
  • Edge computing solutions involving micromachines in agriculture
  • Artificial intelligence techniques for enhancing agri-micro-robots
  • The use of IoT applications on agricultural micromachines
  • Swarm or fleet robotics for micro-scale agricultural operations, including collaboration among ground and aerial vehicles
  • Augmented reality and digital twins for facilitating micro-scale agriculture

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 3856 KiB  
Article
Measuring Shape Parameters of Pearls in Batches Using Machine Vision: A Case Study
by Xinying Liu, Shoufeng Jin, Zixuan Yang, Grzegorz Królczyk and Zhixiong Li
Micromachines 2022, 13(4), 546; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/mi13040546 - 30 Mar 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1759
Abstract
To solve the problem of low precision of pearl shape parameters’ measurement caused by the mutual contact of batches of pearls and the error of shape sorting, a method of contacting pearls’ segmentation based on the pit detection was proposed. Multiple pearl images [...] Read more.
To solve the problem of low precision of pearl shape parameters’ measurement caused by the mutual contact of batches of pearls and the error of shape sorting, a method of contacting pearls’ segmentation based on the pit detection was proposed. Multiple pearl images were obtained by backlit imaging, the quality of the pearl images was improved through appropriate preprocessing, and the contacted pearl area was extracted by calculating the area ratio of the connected domains. Then, the contour feature of the contact area was obtained by edge tracking to establish the mathematical model of the angles between the edge contour points. By judging the angle with a threshold of 60° as the candidate concave point, a concave point matching algorithm was introduced to get the true concave point, and the Euclidean distance was adopted as a metric function to achieve the segmentation of the tangent pearls. The pearl shape parameters’ model was established through the pearl contour image information, and the shape classification standard was constructed according to the national standard. Experimental results showed that the proposed method produced a better segmentation performance than the popular watershed algorithm and morphological algorithm. The segmentation accuracy was above 95%, the average loss rate was within 4%, and the sorting accuracy based on the shape information was 94%. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Micromachines in Agriculture: Current Trends and Perspectives)
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27 pages, 10100 KiB  
Article
Design and Implementation of an Urban Farming Robot
by Michail Moraitis, Konstantinos Vaiopoulos and Athanasios T. Balafoutis
Micromachines 2022, 13(2), 250; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/mi13020250 - 02 Feb 2022
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 4449
Abstract
Urban agriculture can be shortly defined as the growing of plants and/or the livestock husbandry in and around cities. Although it has been a common occupation for the urban population all along, recently there is a growing interest in it both from public [...] Read more.
Urban agriculture can be shortly defined as the growing of plants and/or the livestock husbandry in and around cities. Although it has been a common occupation for the urban population all along, recently there is a growing interest in it both from public bodies and researchers, as well as from ordinary citizens who want to engage in self-cultivation. The modern citizen, though, will hardly find the free time to grow his own vegetables as it is a process that requires, in addition to knowledge and disposition, consistency. Given the above considerations, the purpose of this work was to develop an economic robotic system for the automatic monitoring and management of an urban garden. The robotic system was designed and built entirely from scratch. It had to have suitable dimensions so that it could be placed in a balcony or a terrace, and be able to scout vegetables from planting to harvest and primarily conduct precision irrigation based on the growth stage of each plant. Fertigation and weed control will also follow. For its development, a number of technologies were combined, such as Cartesian robots’ motion, machine vision, deep learning for the identification and detection of plants, irrigation dosage and scheduling based on plants’ growth stage, and cloud storage. The complete process of software and hardware development to a robust robotic platform is described in detail in the respective sections. The experimental procedure was performed for lettuce plants, with the robotic system providing precise movement of its actuator and applying precision irrigation based on the specific needs of the plants. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Micromachines in Agriculture: Current Trends and Perspectives)
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