Accurate and robust recognition of daylily flower buds at the pre-bloom stage is essential for timely harvesting and quality preservation, yet remains highly challenging under natural field conditions due to the buds’ slender morphology, diverse orientations, dense distribution, and frequent occlusion by foliage. Existing horizontal-box object detectors struggle to capture the orientation and geometric structure of daylily buds, leading to inaccurate localization and unreliable guidance for automated harvesting. To address these challenges, we propose DDM-YOLO, a lightweight orientation-aware detection model tailored for daylily production environments. The model integrates three key components: (i) a Multi-scale Adaptive Feature Pyramid Network (MAFPN) that enhances the extraction and fusion of multi-dimensional features for densely distributed and occluded slender buds; (ii) a Lightweight Adaptive Direction-aware Head (LADH) that dynamically optimizes angle regression for rotated bounding boxes, improving orientation stability and reducing localization bias; and (iii) an Adaptive Down-sampling module (Adown) that preserves structurally critical spatial cues while reducing model complexity. Experiments conducted on a custom daylily field dataset demonstrate that DDM-YOLO achieves 96.8% precision and 98.1% mAP50, outperforming the baseline YOLOv11n-OBB by 1.3 percentage points in mAP while reducing model parameters by 17.0% to 2.2M. Deployment verification using a PySide5-based visualization prototype demonstrated a total system-level latency of less than 0.2 s, a duration encompassing the cumulative overhead of image input and output, pre-processing, post-processing including non-maximum suppression, and interface rendering. Furthermore, physical deployment on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin embedded platform utilizing TensorRT optimization achieved an impressive inference speed of 114.5 FPS, corresponding to approximately 8.7 ms per frame. This performance confirms that the model meets the stringent real-time requirements for edge computing in mobile agricultural robotics. The model efficiently and accurately performs oriented detection and harvesting pose estimation for daylily buds, providing critical technical support for the visual perception system of harvesting robots.

Robotic pollination represents a pivotal component of smart agriculture, with foundational architectures for target recognition, path planning, and motion control having been progressively established. However, developing an efficient and robust pollination system that integrates perception, decision-making, and execution within real-world scenarios remains confronted with complex challenges. This study systematically reviews recent advancements in the field and distills the core technical issues of greenhouse robotic pollination into three primary domains: target detection and pose estimation, end-effector design, and pollination strategies combined with motion control. Focusing on the visual perception of flowers, actuator architecture, and operational tactics, this review synthesizes existing academic findings to evaluate the state-of-the-art in flower detection and pose estimation, characterize diverse end-effector designs, and analyze the evolutionary trajectory of motion control techniques. Specifically, the analysis encompasses the impact of detection algorithms on recognition accuracy and robustness, the structural classification and performance attributes of pollination mechanisms, and the optimization of control strategies. Furthermore, the study categorizes global research backgrounds, technical methodologies, and paradigmatic system cases, offering a critical evaluation of experiences in constructing automated pollination systems. Despite these advances, current robotic pollination technologies for peppers (chili) face significant bottlenecks characterized by immature methods for precise flower detection and pose estimation, the need for optimized specialized end-effector designs, and insufficient robustness in decision-making systems under dynamic environmental conditions. To address these issues, future development should prioritize constructing diverse, large-scale flower image and pose datasets while developing detection algorithms adaptable to complex environments to achieve high-precision identification. Additionally, implementing this system requires a hierarchical architecture where perception drives adaptive actuation. Deep learning models must localize flower targets and assess maturity in real-time, feeding coordinates to path planners that generate collision-free trajectories through foliage. These trajectories are executed via multimodal motion control, synchronizing the rigid manipulator with soft end-effectors. By embedding tactile feedback into the machine learning loop, the system creates a unified sensorimotor framework. This enables dynamic force modulation based on physical resistance, ensuring precise, non-destructive pollination tailored to chili plants.

Developing a flow rate model for the screw feeder and optimizing discharge performance are crucial for achieving automated intelligent precision feeding. This study constructs a mass flow rate model for screw conveyors, considering the coupled structural parameters of the hopper and screw conveyor. The model is developed using single-factor tests and central composite design (CCD) response surface tests and is validated through actual discharge tests. Results indicate that the discharge rate in the hopper–screw conveyor system is primarily influenced by the screw conveyor itself. Among the structural parameters, the hopper inclination angle and the hopper discharge opening length significantly affect the filling coefficient. Validation tests show an average error of 6.8% between the predicted and simulated mass flow rates and 5.0% with the actual mass flow rate, demonstrating the model’s high precision and accuracy.

Chili pepper (Capsicum spp.) is a high-value industrial horticultural crop widely utilized in food processing, pharmaceuticals, and natural pigment production. Accurate monitoring of flowering is critical for yield formation, pollination management, and early-stage production forecasting in industrial chili production systems. However, in greenhouse environments, chili flowers typically exhibit small object scale and are affected by issues such as lighting variations and occlusion, which pose significant challenges for reliable visual detection. These factors often result in missed detections and unstable performance in practical phenological monitoring tasks. To address these challenges, this study proposes CF-DETR, a robust transformer-based framework for small-scale chili flower detection. Built upon the RT-DETR architecture, the proposed method introduces an efficiency-optimized FasterNet backbone to enhance fine-grained feature extraction for small targets while maintaining computational efficiency. In addition, a dynamic upsampling mechanism is incorporated to preserve structural details during feature reconstruction, and a Bidirectional Multi-scale Attention Feature Pyramid Network (BiMAFPN) is designed to strengthen cross-scale feature interaction under complex greenhouse backgrounds and occlusion conditions. Experiments conducted on a self-constructed greenhouse dataset demonstrate that CF-DETR achieves a Precision of 94.1%, mAP50 of 83.5%, and mAP50–95 of 64.5%, outperforming the baseline RT-DETR-r18 model. Furthermore, deployment on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin platform achieves real-time inference at 30.65 FPS, validating its practical applicability in edge-enabled agricultural systems. The proposed framework provides a reliable visual sensing solution for small-scale phenology monitoring, enabling intelligent pollination management, early yield prediction, and data-driven decision-making in industrial chili production. This work contributes to the advancement of precision horticulture and the digital transformation of industrial crop production systems.

Agricultural engineering informatics is playing an increasingly important role in enabling intelligent perception, decision-making, and automated operations in modern horticultural production systems. Within this context, accurate visual perception of reproductive structures is essential for agricultural informatization tasks such as flowering-stage monitoring, precision pollination, and information-driven fruit-set management in chili cultivation. However, reliable detection and pose-aware recognition of chili flowers remain challenging because of small target size, dense distribution, foliage occlusion, and illumination variability in natural or semi-controlled environments. To address these challenges, this study proposes a lightweight and robust edge vision framework, termed CFPR-YOLO, for chili flower detection and pose-aware perception under complex agricultural conditions. Built upon an improved YOLOv11n architecture, the proposed framework incorporates EfficientFormerV2 to strengthen global-context feature extraction, a C3k2_EMA module to enhance localization of small and occluded targets, and Poly-Scale Convolution (PSConv) to preserve structural details while reducing computational redundancy. In addition, a lightweight attention mechanism is introduced to improve feature discrimination in cluttered backgrounds. Experimental results on both self-constructed and generalization datasets show that the proposed method achieves a precision of 92.6%, a recall of 86.8%, and an mAP50 of 92.1% with only 7.26 M parameters. The framework also demonstrates strong robustness and generalization across different chili varieties. When deployed on an edge computing platform (NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin), the model achieves real-time inference at 39.5 FPS. Furthermore, validation experiments under controlled indoor conditions show that the proposed framework can effectively support simulated pollination tasks, achieving a success rate of 90.0% for upwardfacing flowers. These results indicate that CFPR-YOLO provides an effective visual perception solution for agricultural engineering informatics-oriented pollination systems and offers practical potential for precision pollination and intelligent fruit-set management in horticultural production.

To address the challenges of difficult feature extraction and insufficient recognition accuracy caused by the small size of chili flowers, occlusion by branches and leaves, and illumination variations in complex field environments, a dual-backbone-based chili flower pose estimation algorithm, termed DCFP-YOLO, is proposed. Built upon the YOLO11n framework, the proposed method performs classification and recognition of five typical upward-oriented chili flower poses. To alleviate the loss of local detail features of small chili flowers under complex backgrounds, a dual-backbone feature extraction network composed of StarNet and ShuffleNetV2 is constructed. Specifically, the StarNet backbone enhances the extraction of fine-grained local features from key floral regions, while the ShuffleNetV2 backbone improves the perception of global spatial structural information. The complementary fusion of dual-backbone features strengthens the representation capability of chili flower pose features in complex environments. To mitigate the attenuation of shallow detail information during multi-scale feature transmission, a Bidirectional Multi-branch Auxiliary Feature Pyramid Network (BiMAFPN) is designed to enhance feature propagation through cross-scale feature interaction, thereby improving pose recognition performance under occlusion and overlapping conditions. Furthermore, a Programmable Gradient Information (PGI)-assisted training mechanism is introduced to optimize gradient propagation paths and alleviate information bottlenecks in deep networks, thereby enhancing the robustness of multi-pose feature extraction under occlusion, blur, and complex illumination conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that DCFP-YOLO achieves recall, mAP50, and mAP50 values of 87.4%, 92.0%, and 66.9%, respectively, representing improvements of 1.7, 1.3, and 3.5 percentage points over the baseline model. Overall performance surpasses that of current mainstream object detection algorithms. After deployment on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin platform, the model achieves an inference speed of 20.9 frames/s, which can basically satisfy the real-time perception requirements of chili flower pose recognition in complex agricultural environments. The proposed method provides an effective visual perception framework for chili flower pose recognition in complex agricultural environments. Rather than constituting a complete robotic pollination solution, the developed model serves as a potential perception component for future intelligent pollination robotic systems, providing reliable flower pose information for subsequent research on target localization, end-effector alignment, and robotic pollination in unstructured greenhouse environments.