Cotton is the most widely cultivated natural fiber crop worldwide, yet it is highly susceptible to various diseases and pests that significantly compromise both yield and quality. To enable rapid and accurate diagnosis of cotton diseases and pests—thus supporting the development of effective control strategies and facilitating genetic breeding research—we propose a lightweight model, the Resource-efficient Cotton Network (RF-Cott-Net), alongside an open-source image dataset, CCDPHD-11, encompassing 11 disease categories. Built upon the MobileViTv2 backbone, RF-Cott-Net integrates an early exit mechanism and quantization-aware training (QAT) to enhance deployment efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. Experimental results on CCDPHD-11 demonstrate that RF-Cott-Net achieves an accuracy of 98.4%, an F1-score of 98.4%, a precision of 98.5%, and a recall of 98.3%. With only 4.9 M parameters, 310 M FLOPs, an inference time of 3.8 ms, and a storage footprint of just 4.8 MB, RF-Cott-Net delivers outstanding accuracy and real-time performance, making it highly suitable for deployment on agricultural edge devices and providing robust support for in-field automated detection of cotton diseases and pests.

The accurate identification of crop pests and diseases is critical for global food security, yet the development of robust deep learning models is hindered by the limitations of existing datasets. To address this gap, we introduce DLCPD-25, a new large-scale, diverse, and publicly available benchmark dataset. We constructed DLCPD-25 by integrating 221,943 images from both online sources and extensive field collections, covering 23 crop types and 203 distinct classes of pests, diseases, and healthy states. A key feature of this dataset is its realistic complexity, including images from uncontrolled field environments and a natural long-tail class distribution, which contrasts with many existing datasets collected under controlled conditions. To validate its utility, we pre-trained several state-of-the-art self-supervised learning models (MAE, SimCLR v2, MoCo v3) on DLCPD-25. The learned representations, evaluated via linear probing, demonstrated strong performance, with the SimCLR v2 framework achieving a top accuracy of 72.1% and an F1 score (Macro F1) of 71.3% on a downstream classification task. Our results confirm that DLCPD-25 provides a valuable and challenging resource that can effectively support the training of generalizable models, paving the way for the development of comprehensive, real-world agricultural diagnostic systems.

High-throughput plant phenotyping (HTPP) is increasingly limited by the mismatch between the need for field-relevant, fine-grained phenotypic information and the restricted capability of conventional observation platforms under complex agricultural conditions. Ground mobile robots are emerging as the key carrier for resolving this gap because they combine close-range sensing, autonomous mobility, and physical interaction within real field environments. In this paper, a structured scoping review is presented using a closed-loop perception–decision–action pipeline as the organizing principle. Within this framework, recent advances are synthesized from the perspectives of multimodal fusion, localization-aware sensing, motion planning, deep-learning-based phenotypic analysis, active observation, robotic intervention, and edge deployment. The review further clarifies the complementary roles of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), and air–ground collaboration in multiscale phenotyping workflows. Beyond summarizing technologies, the article provides three concrete deliverables: a structured taxonomy of mobile phenotyping systems; comparative tables covering sensing modalities, localization/navigation methods, and AI models; and a research agenda linking technical progress to field deployability. The synthesis highlights four persistent bottlenecks, namely environmental generalization, annotation scarcity, limited standardization and reproducibility, and the gap between advanced models and agricultural edge hardware. Overall, ground robots are identified not merely as sensing platforms, but as the central system architecture for advancing mobile phenotyping toward autonomous, fine-grained, and field-deployable operation.

High-throughput plant phenotyping is increasingly constrained by the mismatch between the demand for field-relevant, fine-grained phenotypic data and the limited capability of conventional observation platforms under complex agricultural conditions. In this context, mobile phenotyping systems, particularly ground robots, are emerging as a key technological pathway for bridging macro-scale monitoring and organ-level trait analysis. This review examines the development of mobile phenotyping platforms for high-throughput plant phenotyping, with emphasis on the evolving role of ground robots in field-based sensing, decision-making, and active interaction. We first compare the functional characteristics of unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles and discuss their complementarity in multiscale phenotypic data acquisition. We then summarize recent advances in the core technical framework of mobile phenotyping robots, including multimodal perception, localization and mapping, motion planning, deep-learning-based phenotypic analysis, active observation, robotic intervention, and edge deployment. Major challenges are further discussed, particularly those related to environmental generalization, data annotation, standardization, reproducibility, and long-term field reliability. Finally, future directions are outlined from the perspectives of air–ground collaboration, multi-robot systems, foundation models, and embodied intelligence. This review highlights ground robots as a central carrier for advancing mobile phenotyping toward autonomous, fine-grained, and field-deployable systems.