Unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) have attracted much attention in crop phenotype monitoring due to their lightweight and flexibility. This paper describes a new UGV equipped with an electric slide rail and point cloud high-throughput acquisition and phenotype extraction system. The designed UGV is equipped with an autopilot system, a small electric slide rail, and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) to achieve high-throughput, high-precision automatic crop point cloud acquisition and map building. The phenotype analysis system realized single plant segmentation and pipeline extraction of plant height and maximum crown width of the crop point cloud using the Random sampling consistency (RANSAC), Euclidean clustering, and k-means clustering algorithm. This phenotyping system was used to collect point cloud data and extract plant height and maximum crown width for 54 greenhouse-potted lettuce plants. The results showed that the correlation coefficient (R2) between the collected data and manual measurements were 0.97996 and 0.90975, respectively, while the root mean square error (RMSE) was 1.51 cm and 4.99 cm, respectively. At less than a tenth of the cost of the PlantEye F500, UGV achieves phenotypic data acquisition with less error and detects morphological trait differences between lettuce types. Thus, it could be suitable for actual 3D phenotypic measurements of greenhouse crops.

Sustainable management issues of waste during drilling oil wells in marine conditions, the process of disposal of drill cuttings in the conditions of deficiency, and fuzzy initial information using fuzzy inference system are investigated. Based on the conducted system analysis, the main criteria for controlling the process of re-injection of suspended drill cuttings were analyzed and selected. We described the technology of preparation and injection of drill cuttings slurry into the underground horizon. The method of modeling and management of the process of disposal of drilling cuttings in the marine environment in a fuzzy environment with the use of fuzzy inference system, which helps to overcome the problems of scarcity and fuzziness of the original information due to the knowledge and experience of experts are proposed. The scheme and structure of the elements of the fuzzy inference system based on the Mamdani algorithm are given. The implementation of the fuzzy output system procedure was carried out in MatLab using Fuzzy Logic Toolbox. For the purpose of sustainable waste management in the process of oil production of marine fields, waste management tasks are formulated as a fuzzy mathematical programming problem, which takes into account economic and environmental criteria and many production constraints that may be fuzzy. Since the vector of such criteria is characterized by inconsistency, the developed methods for solving the set tasks of sustainable management are based on various tradeoff schemes modified to work in a fuzzy environment. The novelty and originality of the developed methods lies in the fact that, unlike the well-known methods of similar methods for solving fuzzy problems, they are set and solved without conversion to a system of equivalent deterministic problems, with-out losing the main part of the collected fuzzy information. This allows, through the full use of the original fuzzy information, to obtain a more adequate solution to the fuzzy problem of the real problem under production conditions.

Rubber trees along the southeast coast of China always suffer severe damage from hurricanes. Quantitative assessments of the capacity for wind resistance of various rubber tree clones are currently lacking. We focus on a vulnerability assessment of rubber trees of different clones under wind disturbance impacts by employing multidisciplinary approaches incorporating scanned points, aerodynamics, machine learning and computer graphics. Point cloud data from two typical rubber trees belonging to different clones (PR107 and CATAS 7-20-59) were collected using terrestrial laser scanning, and a connection chain of tree skeletons was constructed using a clustering algorithm of machine learning. The concept of foliage clumps based on the trunk and first-order branches was first proposed to optimize rubber tree plot 3D modelling for simulating the wind field and assessing the wind-related parameters. The results from the obtained phenotypic traits show that the variable leaf area index and included angle between the branches and trunk result in variations in the topological structure and gap fraction of tree crowns, respectively, which are the major influencing factors relevant to the rubber tree’s capacity to resist hurricane strikes. The aerodynamics analysis showed that the maximum dynamic pressure, wind velocity and turbulent intensity of the wind-related parameters in rubber tree plots of clone PR107 (300 Pa, 30 m/s and 15%) are larger than that in rubber tree plots of clone CATAS-7-20-59 (120 Pa, 18 m/s and 5%), which results in a higher probability of local strong cyclone occurrence and a higher vulnerability to hurricane damage.

Research advance in phenotype detection robots for agriculture and forestry

The spatial and temporal dynamics of crop canopy structure are influenced by cultivar, environment, and crop management practices. However, continuous and automatic monitoring of crop canopy structure is still challenging. A three-dimensional (3D) time-series phenotyping study of maize canopy was conducted using a rail-driven high-throughput plant phenotyping platform (HTPPP) in field conditions. An adaptive sliding window segmentation algorithm was proposed to obtain plots and rows from canopy point clouds. Maximum height (H_max), mean height (H_mean), and canopy cover (CC) of each plot were extracted, and quantification of plot canopy height uniformity (CHU) and marginal effect (ME_H) was achieved. The results showed that the average mIoU, mP, mR, and mF₁ of canopy–plot segmentation were 0.8118, 0.9587, 0.9969, and 0.9771, respectively, and the average mIoU, mP, mR, and mF₁ of plot–row segmentation were 0.7566, 0.8764, 0.9292, and 0.8974, respectively. The average RMSE of plant height across the 10 growth stages was 0.08 m. The extracted time-series phenotypes show that CHU tended to vary from uniformity to nonuniformity and continued to fluctuate during the whole growth stages, and the ME_H of the canopy tended to increase negatively over time. This study provides automated and practical means for 3D time-series phenotype monitoring of plant canopies with the HTPPP.

Plant height and SPAD values are critical indicators for evaluating peanut morphological development, photosynthetic efficiency, and yield optimization. Recent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology advancements have enabled high-throughput phenotyping at field scales. As a globally strategic oilseed crop, peanut plays a vital role in ensuring food and edible oil security. This study aimed to develop an optimized estimation framework for peanut plant height and SPAD values through machine learning-driven integration of UAV multi-source data while evaluating model generalizability across temporal and spatial domains. Multispectral UAV and ground data were collected across four growth stages (2023–2024). Using spectral indices and Texture features, four models (PLSR, SVM, ANN, RFR) were trained on 2024 data and independently validated with 2023 datasets. The ensemble machine learning models (RFR) significantly enhanced estimation accuracy (R² improvement: 3.1–34.5%) and robustness compared to the linear model (PLSR). Feature stability analysis revealed that combined spectral-textural features outperformed single-feature approaches. The SVM model achieved superior plant height prediction (R² = 0.912, RMSE = 2.14 cm), while RFR optimally estimated SPAD values (R² = 0.530, RMSE = 3.87) across heterogeneous field conditions. This UAV-based multi-modal integration framework demonstrates significant potential for temporal monitoring of peanut growth dynamics.