Yisheng Miao’s research while affiliated with National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture and other places

Smart agricultural machinery is built upon traditional agricultural equipment, further integrating modern information technologies to achieve automation, precision, and intelligence in agricultural production. Currently, significant progress has been made in the autonomous operation and monitoring technologies of smart agricultural machinery in China. However, challenges remain, including poor adaptability to complex environments, high equipment costs, and issues with system implementation and standardization integration. To help industry professionals quickly understand the current state and promote the rapid development of smart agricultural machinery, this paper provides an overview of the key technologies related to autonomous operation and monitoring in China’s smart agricultural equipment. These technologies include environmental perception, positioning and navigation, autonomous operation and path planning, agricultural machinery status monitoring and fault diagnosis, and field operation monitoring. Each of these key technologies is discussed in depth with examples and analyses. On this basis, the paper analyzes the main challenges faced by the development of autonomous operation and monitoring technologies in China’s smart agricultural machinery sector. Furthermore, it explores the future directions for the development of autonomous operation and monitoring technologies in smart agricultural machinery. This research is of great importance for promoting the transition of China’s agricultural production towards automation and intelligence, improving agricultural production efficiency, and reducing reliance on human labor.

Transplanting is a critical step in vegetable production, and the application of automatic transplanters can significantly reduce labor intensity, improve production efficiency, and enhance the precision and consistency of operations. However, automatic transplanters are structurally complex, with diverse components, each design and function offering its own advantages and limitations. To assist industry professionals in quickly understanding and selecting transplanters suited to specific crops and environments, this paper reviews three key technologies in current vegetable transplanters: planting mechanisms, automated seedling picking and placing, and tray conveyance. Each technology is classified, compared, and analyzed to evaluate its applicability. Based on the current state of technology, the paper identifies major challenges in the development of vegetable transplanters in China, including insufficient integration of machinery and agronomy, high demands for equipment adaptability, lack of standardized systems, and delays in the development of core technologies for fully automated transplanting. Solutions are proposed for each of these issues. Finally, the paper discusses future directions for the development of automatic transplanters, including enhancing transplanting efficiency, achieving autonomous navigation, digitalizing operations, developing supporting systems for transplanting, and unmanned transplanting.

Transporting harvested vegetables in the field or greenhouse is labor-intensive. The utilization of small harvest-aid vehicles can reduce non-productive time for farmers and improve harvest efficiency. This paper models the process of harvesting vegetables in response to non-productive waiting delays caused by the scheduling of harvest-aid vehicles. Taking into consideration harvesting speed, harvest-aid vehicle capacity, and scheduling conflicts, a harvest-aid vehicle scheduling model is constructed to minimize non-production waiting time and coordination costs. Subsequently, to meet the collaborative needs of harvesters, this paper develops a discrete multi-objective Jaya optimization algorithm (DMO-Jaya), which combines an opposition-based learning mechanism and a long-term memory library to obtain scheduling schemes suitable for agricultural environments. Experiments show that the studied model can schedule harvest-aid vehicles without conflicts. Compared to the NSGA-II algorithm and the MMOPSO, the DMO-Jaya algorithm demonstrates a better diversity of solutions, resulting in a shorter non-productive waiting time for harvesters. This research provides a reference model for improving the efficiency of vegetable harvesting and transportation.

To enhance the transplantation effectiveness of vegetables and promptly formulate subsequent work strategies, it is imperative to study the recognition approach for transplanted seedlings. In the natural and complex environment, factors like background and sunlight often hinder accurate target recognition. To overcome these challenges, this study explores a lightweight yet efficient algorithm for recognizing cabbage transplantation states in natural settings. Initially, FasterNet is integrated as the backbone network in the YOLOv5s model, aiming to expedite convergence speed and bolster feature extraction capabilities. Secondly, the introduction of the GAM attention mechanism enhances the algorithm’s focus on cabbage seedlings. EIoU loss is incorporated to improve both network convergence speed and localization precision. Lastly, the model incorporates deformable convolution DCNV3, which further optimizes model parameters and attains a superior balance between accuracy and speed. Upon testing the refined YOLOv5s target detection algorithm, improvements were evident. When compared to the original model, the mean average precision (mAP) rose by 3.5 percentage points, recall increased by 1.7 percentage points, and detection speed witnessed an impressive boost of 52 FPS. This enhanced algorithm not only reduces model complexity but also elevates network performance. The method is expected to streamline transplantation quality measurements, minimize time and labor inputs, and elevate field transplantation quality surveys’ automation levels.

In view of the differences in appearance and the complex backgrounds of crop diseases, automatic identification of field diseases is an extremely challenging topic in smart agriculture. To address this challenge, a popular approach is to design a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) model that extracts visual disease features in the images and then identifies the diseases based on the extracted features. This approach performs well under simple background conditions, but has low accuracy and poor robustness under complex backgrounds. In this paper, an end-to-end disease identification model composed of a disease-spot region detector and a disease classifier (YOLOv5s + BiCMT) was proposed. Specifically, the YOLOv5s network was used to detect the disease-spot regions so as to provide a regional attention mechanism to facilitate the disease identification task of the classifier. For the classifier, a Bidirectional Cross-Modal Transformer (BiCMT) model combining the image and text modal information was constructed, which utilizes the correlation and complementarity between the features of the two modalities to achieve the fusion and recognition of disease features. Meanwhile, the problem of inconsistent lengths among different modal data sequences was solved. Eventually, the YOLOv5s + BiCMT model achieved the optimal results on a small dataset. Its Accuracy, Precision, Sensitivity, and Specificity reached 99.23, 97.37, 97.54, and 99.54%, respectively. This paper proves that the bidirectional cross-modal feature fusion by combining disease images and texts is an effective method to identify vegetable diseases in field environments.

Rice has a wide planting area as one of the essential food crops in China. The problem of diseases and pests in rice production has always been one of the main factors affecting its quality and yield. It is essential to provide treatment methods and means for rice diseases and pests quickly and accurately in the production process. Therefore, we used the rice question-and-answer (Q&A) community as an example. This paper aimed at the critical technical problems faced by the agricultural Q&A community: the accuracy of the existing agricultural Q&A model is low, which is challenging to meet users’ requirements to obtain answers in real-time in the production process. A network based on Attention-ResLSTM-seq2seq was used to realize the construction of the rice question and answer model. Firstly, the text presentation of rice question-and-answer pairs was obtained using the GPT pre-training model based on a 12-layer transformer. Then, ResLSTM(Residual Long Short-Term Memory) was used to extract text features in the encoder and decoder, and the output project matrix and output gate of LSTM were used to control the spatial information flow. When the network contacts the optimal state, the network only retains the constant mapping value of the input vector, which effectually reduces the network parameters and increases the network performance. Next, the attention mechanism was connected between the encoder and the decoder, which can effectually strengthen the weight of the keyword feature information of the question. The results showed that the BLEU and ROUGE of the Attention-ResLSTM-Seq2seq model reached the highest scores, 35.3% and 37.8%, compared with the other six rice-related generative question answering models.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) enable the acquisition of multisource environmental data and crop states in precision agriculture. However, the complex agricultural environment causes the WSN topology to change frequently and link connection probability is difficult to predict. In order to improve the utilization of network resources and balance the network energy consumption, this paper studies an agricultural fault-tolerant topology construction method based on the potential game and cut vertex detection. Considering the connectivity redundancy, node lifetime, and residual energy, a fault-tolerant topology algorithm for agricultural WSN based on a double price function is designed. The network is clustered according to the node location and residual energy to form a single-hop effective cluster. Based on the network cluster, the price function is constructed in order to reduce energy consumption and balance network energy efficiency. The initial transmit power set supporting inter-cluster communication is obtained by potential game theory. While preserving the game characteristics of topology, the redundant links are eliminated and the transmit power is adjusted by a cut vertex detection algorithm to realize the construction of a 2-connected cluster head network. Simulation results show that the network topology constructed by the studied algorithm can balance the energy consumption and prolong the network lifetime effectively.