With the advent of agriculture 4.0 era, the combination of agriculture and unmanned technology has promoted the development of intelligent agriculture. However, there are relatively few studies on the agricultural robot task allocation problem to optimize the cost and efficiency of smart farms. To make up this deficiency, this paper addresses a multi-picking-robot task allocation (MPRTA) problem with two objectives of minimizing the maximum completion time and minimizing the total travel length of all robots. An effective multi-objective discrete artificial bee colony (MODABC) algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. At first, a heuristic allocation method based on robot load balancing is designed to generate high-quality initial solutions. And then, a multi-objective self-adaptive strategy is proposed to enhance the exploitation and exploration of the algorithm. In addition, a multi-objective local search strategy for the non-dominated solutions is presented to help the population find better solutions. At last, extensive experiments based on different task sizes and robot scales of an intelligent orchard demonstrate the effectiveness and high performance of the proposed algorithm for solving the MPRTA problem.

Weeds significantly impact crop yields and quality, necessitating strict control. Effective weed identification is essential to precision weeding in the field. Existing detection methods struggle with the inconsistent size scales of weed targets and the issue of small targets, making it difficult to achieve efficient detection, and they are unable to satisfy both the speed and accuracy requirements for detection at the same time. Therefore, this study, focusing on three common types of weeds in the field—Amaranthus retroflexus, Eleusine indica, and Chenopodium—proposes the HAD-YOLO model. With the purpose of improving the model’s capacity to extract features and making it more lightweight, this algorithm employs the HGNetV2 as its backbone network. The Scale Sequence Feature Fusion Module (SSFF) and Triple Feature Encoding Module (TFE) from the ASF-YOLO are introduced to improve the model’s capacity to extract features across various scales, and on this basis, to improve the model’s capacity to detect small targets, a P2 feature layer is included. Finally, a target detection head with an attention mechanism, Dynamic head (Dyhead), is utilized to improve the detection head’s capacity for representation. Experimental results show that on the dataset collected in the greenhouse, the mAP for weed detection is 94.2%; using this as the pre-trained weight, on the dataset collected in the field environment, the mAP for weed detection is 96.2%, and the detection FPS is 30.6. Overall, the HAD-YOLO model has effectively addressed the requirements for accurate weed identification, offering both theoretical and technical backing for automatic weed control. Future efforts will involve collecting more weed data from various agricultural field scenarios to validate and enhance the generalization capabilities of the HAD-YOLO model.

Nowadays robots have been commonly adopted in various manufacturing industries to improve product quality and productivity. The selection of the best robot to suit a specific production setting is a difficult decision making task for manufacturers because of the increase in complexity and number of robot systems. In this paper, we explore two key issues of robot evaluation and selection: the representation of decision makers’ diversified assessments and the determination of the ranking of available robots. Specifically, a decision support model which utilizes cloud model and TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese of interactive and multiple criteria decision making) method is developed for the purpose of handling robot selection problems with hesitant linguistic information. Besides, we use an entropy-based combination weighting technique to estimate the weights of evaluation criteria. Finally, we illustrate the proposed cloud TODIM approach with a robot selection example for an automobile manufacturer, and further validate its effectiveness and benefits via a comparative analysis. The results show that the proposed robot selection model has some unique advantages, which is more realistic and flexible for robot selection under a complex and uncertain environment.

This article proposes an efficient nonlinear process monitoring method (DCCA-SCO) by integrating canonical correlation analysis (CCA), deep autoencoder neural networks (DAENNs), and sparsity-constrained optimization (SCO). Specifically, DAENNs are first used to learn a nonlinear function automatically, which characterizes intrinsic features of the original process data. Then, the CCA is performed in that low-dimensional representation space to extract the most correlated variables. In addition, the SCO is imposed to reduce the redundancy of the hidden representation. Unlike other deep CCA methods, the DCCA-SCO provides a new nonlinear method that is able to learn a nonlinear mapping with a sparse prior. The validity of the proposed DCCA-SCO is extensively demonstrated on the benchmark Tennessee Eastman (TE) process and the diesel generator process. In particular, compared with the classical CCA, the fault detection rate is increased by 8.00% for the fault IDV(11) in the TE process.

Robotic harvesting has become an urgent need for the development of the apple industry, due to the sharp decline in agricultural labor. At present, harvesting apples using robots in unstructured orchard environments remains a significant challenge. This paper focuses on addressing the challenges of perception, localization, and dual-arm coordination in harvesting robots and presents a dual-arm apple harvesting robot system. First, the paper introduces the integration of the robot’s hardware and software systems, as well as the control system architecture, and describes the robot’s workflow. Secondly, combining a dual-vision perception system, the paper adopts a fruit recognition method based on a multi-task network model and a frustum-based fruit localization approach to identify and localize fruits. Finally, to improve collaboration efficiency, a multi-arm task planning method based on a genetic algorithm is used to optimize the target harvesting sequence for each arm. Field experiments were conducted in an orchard to evaluate the overall performance of the robot system. The field trials demonstrated that the robot system achieved an overall harvest success rate of 76.97%, with an average fruit picking time of 7.29 s per fruit and a fruit damage rate of only 5.56%.