Guest Editorial Focused Section on Mechatronics Applications in Agriculture

The goal of this Focused Section is to present the recent advancements in mechatronics to solve complex tasks, such as harvesting, pruning, thinning, mowing, spraying, weed removal, and phytochemical treatments, which are very challenging because of the dynamic and uncertain nature of agricultural environments, unlike the more structured and deterministic indoor industrial settings. In this Focused Section of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MECHATRONICS, four papers have been selected to represent the current progress of the mechatronics applications in agriculture. These papers address several of the aspects just mentioned. One paper discusses the mechatronic design of an asparagus harvesting robot. Another paper presents a novel approach for cutting blade sharpness monitoring. The third paper illustrates the effectiveness of a GPS-aided red, green, and blue, with depth information (RGB-D) depth sensor as an economical alternative to light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scanners for capturing canopy geometries, measuring their volumes, and obtaining growth estimates. The last paper provides a thorough review of the imaging and ranging technologies for automated plant phenotyping in precision agriculture. The Guest Editors note that they would have liked to include more contributions concerning other mechatronic systems for agricultural tasks, such as devices for fruit and plant manipulation, novel aspects in collaboration between the farmer and the machines, or other precision sensing and plant tending machines. The space available in the Focused Section and the maturity of the contributions limited the accepted papers. However, the selected contributions should inspire the mechatronics community to continue exploring novel high-impact solutions for the field of agriculture. The papers are briefly summarized.