Cooperative Heterogeneous Robots for Autonomous Insects Trap Monitoring System in a Precision Agriculture Scenario

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The work presented by the authors is compatible with the current precision agriculture trends. The use of both virtual model and empirical approaches is interesting and underlines a deep investigation of the subjects by the authors. However, there are few aspects that, in my opinion, are improvable in order to make the paper more comprehensive and understandable even for those who is starting to approach precision agriculture subject. For instance, many times the authors specify that a particular argument treated in some sections or sub-sections is not the aim of the current work: Maybe they should investigate more deeply those arguments or focus deeply the real aim of the paper. Although, these little corrections, the paper can be assessed positively.

Line-32-33: the sentence is not clear.

Line 42: sentence is not clear.

Line 118-119: the authors said that from the literature overview most works focus on a particular subject, citing only two previous works. The sentence is ambiguous.

Line 200: maybe the authors should add some references.

Line 219-221: maybe the authors should add some references.

Section 3.2: the authors should specify if the camera used to conduit the experiments is the same of the UAS. Furthermore, the authors observed that long distances are no acceptable, but the maximum detection distance defined as acceptable by the authors is the maximum distance tested. So, does the distance ,declared as acceptable, provide acceptable image quality?

Author Response

Dear Editor,

The authors are very grateful for the thorough review of the manuscript. We made all the corrections mentioned by the reviewers, answering each suggestion point by point. We are sending a version of the manuscript with the changes in evidence to help reviewers identify the differences. Again, thank you very much for the careful review and your time.

Dear Reviewer,

First, the authors would like to thank the opportunity to improve this manuscript further. We appreciate your attention and careful review. We have implemented all the requested changes.
To facilitate the review, we use this color scheme:

Blue: Author’s answer

Red: Modifications in the manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript is very interesting and well exposed. I suggest some corrections:

- The abbreviations are defined more than one time (UAS) for example.

- In formulas 1,2,3 write with i as a subscript. In general, in the manuscript rewrite the i and j as subscripts and not with the underscore.

- Table 1 in the header you use the comma as a separator between X and Y, in the body instead you use the semicolon.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper presents a solution for a multi-robot cooperative system architecture consisting of UAS and UGV. This is an interesting idea, and the authors have done a lot of research, but the reviewers think that there are still some shortcomings in the paper, so we would like to make the following suggestions for the manuscript, which can be accepted if the authors can significantly improve the quality of the manuscript.

1. In the introduction part, I didn't see enough explanation on why you choose YOLOv7. Please give more explanation on this part.

2. Vision technology applications in various agriculture fields, should also be introduced for a full glance of the scope of related areas. The first paragraph introducing the research topic may present a much broad and comprehensive view of the problems related to your topic with citations to new references:

[1] Z. Li, D. Xie, L. Liu, H. Wang, and L. Chen, “Inter-row information recognition of maize in the middle and late stages via LiDAR supplementary vision,” Frontiers in Plant Science, vol. 13, 2022, Accessed: Jan. 03, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2022.1024360.

[2] D. Xie, L. Chen, L. Liu, L. Chen, and H. Wang, “Actuators and Sensors for Application in Agricultural Robots: A Review,” Machines, vol. 10, no. 10, Art. no. 10, Oct. 2022, doi: 10.3390/machines10100913.

3. Section 2 of the paper, which summarizes agricultural robots in agricultural production environments and landing systems for agricultural robots, was considered by the reviewers as a section that the authors needed to trim and condense so as to highlight the innovative points and core work of the paper.

4. The paper combines the CoppeliSim platform and experiments to simulate and validate the experimental algorithm, and also combines manual measurements to evaluate the position errors of the aircraft and the landing target. However, the reviewers believe that this real implementation should also have greater difficulties, so the reviewers suggest that the paper should have a discussion section to discuss the results and errors obtained during the study in order to summarize the patterns between them.

5. In this paper, the quality of some pictures is too terrible, some pictures (e.g., Figs. 18, 20, 22) need to be supplemented with axes and units. In addition, the flowchart part of the paper is really bad (e.g., Figs. 4, 6, 8, 10). The font and font size of the text part of the flowchart need to be adapted to the text in the manuscript, and the author can also match different color schemes to beautify the pictures to express the author's intention more clearly.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The author has revised the paper in detail.