Advances of UAV in Precision Agriculture—2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

At present, intelligent agricultural unmanned systems cover four spatial dimensions with broad development prospects: space (navigation, remote sensing, meteorological, and communication satellites); air (plant protection UAVs, remote sensing and mapping UAVs, long-endurance solar-powered UAVs, long-endurance airships, and bionic flying robots); ground (unmanned farming/harvesting machinery, biomass energy systems, soil-improving bionic robots, and unmanned animal husbandry robots); and water (unmanned underwater vehicles, underwater operation robots, and unmanned aquaculture systems). Establishing an agricultural integrated space–air–ground–water cooperation and precision operation system based on the closed-loop control of large systems, studying the intelligent sensing and control technology of intelligent agricultural unmanned systems and establishing application demonstration bases all over the world play an important role in supporting huge developments regarding automotive operations, intelligent operations, unmanned operations, and cluster operations of intelligent agricultural machinery and equipment. It is also of great significance to realize the short-term goal “unmanned farming” and the long-term goal “unmanned agriculture” of world agricultural modernization.

Continuing from the first edition “Advances of UAV in Precision Agriculture”, this Special Issue aims to publish state-of-the-art advances and the latest achievements of UAV technologies in precision agriculture that fully relate to the journal’s scope.

We welcome articles covering recent research on various topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Agricultural information-integrated space–air–ground–water remote sensing and monitoring networks (satellites, UAVs, UGVs, USVs and UUVs) and multi-source data fusion for agricultural applications;
• Unmanned agricultural intelligent sensing and control systems, intelligent agricultural equipment, and autonomous systems for agricultural machinery field operations;
• Unmanned simultaneous localization and mapping and the sensing of unmanned robots in agriculture;
• Unmanned agricultural robot guidance (path planning), navigation and control;
• Bio-inspired swarm intelligence and multi-agent system cooperative control;
• Unmanned soil moisture and crop phenotype detection, hyper-spectral sensing, and quantitative inversion;
• Spray or seeding drones for agricultural applications (fertilization and crop protection);
• Drones for precision agriculture, e.g., nutrients analysis, insect infestation analysis, fungus infestation analysis, snail attack mapping, soil quality and soil compaction mapping, drainage system analysis, harvest prediction;
• Bionic flying robots and flying robots with a soft grasping manipulator;
• Drones in/for greenhouses.

Prof. Dr. Jian Chen
Prof. Dr. Yangquan Chen
Prof. Dr. Yanbo Huang
Prof. Dr. Dongbing Gu
Guest Editors

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