Changes in soybean flower and pod numbers are important factors affecting soybean yields. Obtaining the number of flowers and pods, as well as fallen flowers and pods, quickly and accurately is crucial for soybean variety breeding and high-quality and high-yielding production. This is especially challenging in the natural field environment. Therefore, this study proposed a field soybean flower- and pod-detection method based on an improved network model (YOLOv8-VEW). VanillaNet is used as the backbone feature-extraction network for YOLOv8, and the EMA attention mechanism module is added to C2f, replacing the CioU function with the WIoU position loss function. The results showed that the F1, mAP, and FPS (frames per second) of the YOLOv8-VEW model were 0.95, 96.9%, and 90 FPS, respectively, which were 0.05, 2.4%, and 24 FPS better than those of the YOLOv8 model. The model was used to compare soybean flower and pod counts with manual counts, and its R² for flowers and pods was 0.98311 and 0.98926, respectively, achieving rapid detection of soybean flower pods in the field. This study can provide reliable technical support for detecting soybean flowers and pod numbers in the field and selecting high-yielding varieties.

Off-policy reinforcement learning is usually used to train the grasping task model of the manipulator. However, in the training process, it is difficult to collect enough successful experience data and rewards for learning and training; that is, there is a problem of sparse rewards. Hindsight experience replay (HER) allows the agent to relabel the completed states. However, not all failed experiences have the same effect on learning and training. Facing the many transitions generated by the environment during operation, adopting a random uniform sampling method from the experience replay buffer will result in low data utilization and slow convergence. This paper proposes using a prioritized sampling method to sample the relabelled transitions, and then combines various off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms with it for training in simulated environments. This paper uses the prioritized sampling method, which allows the agent to access more important transitions earlier and accelerate the convergence of training. The results demonstrate that hindsight experience replay with prioritization (PHER) exhibits significantly faster convergence compared to other methods.