A micro unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) only equipped with a monocular camera is hard to accomplish a flying task with obstacles avoidance and target tracking simultaneously. In this article, a bionic dynamic path planning algorithm was developed for cooperation of obstacles avoidance and target tracking. An improved bat algorithm (BA) optimized transfer learning convolutional neural network (CNN) and bio-inspired optical flow balance algorithm was combined for obstacles avoidance. The Hawk-eye algorithm with line of sight (LOS) tracking rules is aimed at UAV dynamic tracking with obstacles avoidance. All of perception information, including avoidance and tracking were fused in UAV motion decision phase. The experiments include “obstacles avoidance” and “obstacles avoidance + target tracking” parts. Comparing with manual control and other algorithms, the bionic dynamic path planning algorithm in this article showed certain advantages in success rate, less obstacles collisions, and less major accidents.

The application of intelligent mobile robots in agriculture has emerged as a new research frontier, with the integration of autonomous navigation technology and intelligent agricultural robots being the key to the widespread adoption of smart agricultural machinery. This paper investigates comprehensive coverage path planning for tracked lawnmowers within orchard environments and addresses challenges related to task allocation and battery life. Firstly, in this study, the motion model of the tracked lawnmower was initially simplified based on assumptions about the orchard environment. Force analyses were conducted on each of its motion mechanisms. For the known orchard environment, a grid-based mapping technique was employed to model the orchard environment. Then, in order to improve the algorithm speed and reduce the number of turns during the lawnmower’s traversal, the A* search algorithm was enhanced by combining the method of robot cluster traversal in the orchard environment. Finally, the improved method was simulated and verified in the MATLAB platform to investigate the influence of the number of lawnmower clusters on the path planning in the connected and non-connected orchards. Furthermore, two sets of on-site field trials were meticulously designed to validate the reliability, practicality, and efficacy of the simulation experiments.

Smart agricultural harvesting robots’ vision recognition, control decision, and mechanical hand modules all resemble the human eye, brain, and hand, respectively. To enable automatic and precise picking of target fruits and vegetables, the system makes use of cutting-edge sensor technology, machine vision algorithms, and intelligent control and decision methods. This paper provides a comprehensive review of international research advancements in the “eye–brain–hand” harvesting systems within the context of smart agriculture, encompassing aspects of mechanical hand devices, visual recognition systems, and intelligent decision systems. Then, the key technologies used in the current research are reviewed, including image processing, object detection and tracking, machine learning, deep learning, etc. In addition, this paper explores the application of the system to different crops and environmental conditions and analyzes its advantages and challenges. Finally, the challenges and prospects for the research on picking robots in the future are presented, including further optimization of the algorithm and improvement of flexibility and reliability of mechanical devices. To sum up, the “eye–brain–hand” picking system in intelligent agriculture has great potential to improve the efficiency and quality of crop picking and reduce labor pressure, and it is expected to be widely used in agricultural production.

In order to meet the needs of intensive mechanized picking in trellised pear orchards, this paper designed a pick-place integrated end-picker based on the analysis of agronomic characteristics of trellised pear gardens and fruit. In order to realize the accurate positioning of pears in picking, based on the kinematic analysis of robot arms and the construction of a private dataset, the YOLOv5s object detection algorithm was used in conjunction with a depth camera to achieve fruit positioning. The hand–eye system calibration was carried out. Aiming at solving the problems of redundancy, inefficiency, and uneven distribution of task volume in the conventional multiple robot arms algorithm, a simulated annealing algorithm was introduced to optimize the picking sequence, and a task allocation method was proposed. On the basis of studying several key parameters affecting the performance of the algorithm, the picking efficiency was greatly optimized. And the effectiveness of the proposed multi-robot collaborative picking method in a trellised pear orchard environment was demonstrated through experiments and simulation verification. The experiments showed that the picking efficiency of the integrated end-picker was increased by about 30%, and the success rate was significantly higher than that of the flexible grippers. The results of this study can be utilized to advance robotic pear-picking research and development.

Distinguishing ship identities is critical in ensuring the safety and supervision of the marine agriculture and transportation industry. In this paper, we present a comprehensive investigation and validation of the progression of ship re-identification technology within a cooperative framework predominantly governed by UAVs. Our research revolves around the creation of a ship ReID dataset, the creation of a ship ReID dataset, the development of a feature extraction network, ranking optimization, and the establishment of a ship identity re-identification system built upon the collaboration of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We introduce a ship ReID dataset named VesselID-700, comprising 56,069 images covering seven classes of typical ships. We also simulated the multi-angle acquisition state of UAVs to categorize the ship orientations within this dataset. To address the challenge of distinguishing between ships with small inter-class differences and large intra-class variations, we propose a fine-grained feature extraction network called FGFN. FGFN enhances the ResNet architecture with a self-attentive mechanism and generalized mean pooling. We also introduce a multi-task loss function that combines classification and triplet loss, incorporating hard sample mining. Ablation experiments on the VesselID-700 dataset demonstrate that the FGFN network achieves outstanding performance, with a Rank-1 accuracy of 89.78% and mAP of 65.72% at a state-of-the-art level. Generalization experiments on pedestrian and vehicle ReID datasets reveal that FGFN excels in recognizing other rigid body targets and diverse viewpoints. Furthermore, to further enhance the advantages of UAV-USV synergy in ship ReID performance, we propose a ranking optimization method based on the homologous fusion of multi-angle UAVs and heterologous fusion of USV-UAV collaborative architecture. This optimization leads to a significant 3% improvement in Rank-1 performance, accompanied by a 73% reduction in retrieval time cost.