The objective of this paper was to report the development of precision agriculture for rice crop production in Taiwan during past five years. Three multi-disciplinary research teams have been organized for the purposes of developing techniques required for monitoring growth status and environmental conditions for rice crop; integrating the elements necessary for fertilization recommendation sys...

Using robots in precision farming has the potential to reduce the reliance on herbicides and pesticides through selectively spraying individual plants or through manual weed removal. A prerequisite for that is the ability of the robot to separate and identify the value crops and the weeds on the field. Based on the output of the robot’s perception system, it can trigger the actuators for sprayi...

To explore small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing identifying technology for horticultural crop diseases, and to combine it with small UAV spraying, the peach leaf blade was taken as material, the peach shot-hole disease was taken as object for spectral capture, and the intellectualized identifying and precision control system for horticultural crop diseases were developed, mainly i...

Automatic navigation (AN) is an essential component to ensure the safety of pesticide application in orchards, whereas precision variable-rate spraying (PVS) serves as indispensable technology for reducing pesticides and protecting environment. At present, AN PVS are not closely combined. In this case, a single three-dimension (3D) light detection ranging (LIDAR) sensor hereby adopted sense inf...

Agricultural tasks are manifold: Dependent on the crop, the environment and the desired plant maintenance operation, properties, such as modularity, robustness, compactness or user friendly interfaces, are advantageous for the automation using a robotic system. Therefore, several robotic manipulators have been designed and built for the requirements given by the EU-FP7 project CROPS for multipl...

While much of modern agriculture is based on mass mechanized production, advances in sensing and manipulation technologies may facilitate precision autonomous operations that could improve crop yield and quality while saving energy, reducing manpower, and being environmentally friendly. In this paper, we focus on autonomous spraying in vineyards and present four machine vision algorithms that f...

Semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (s-SWCNTs) are promising candidates as the active layer in photovoltaics (PV), particularly for niche applications where high infrared absorbance and/or semi-transparent solar cells are desirable. Most current fabrication strategies for SWCNT PV devices suffer from relatively high surface roughness and lack nanometer-scale deposition precision, both...