• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
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• v.45 no.3
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• pp.317-323
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• 2018

The demand for crop production is increasingly becoming steeper due to the rapid population growth. As a result, breeding cycles should be faster than ever before. However, the current breeding methods cannot meet this requirement because traditional phenotyping methods lag far behind even though genotyping methods have been drastically developed with the advent of next-generation sequencing technology over a short period of time. Consequently, phenotyping has become a bottleneck in large-scale genomics-based plant breeding studies. Recently, however, phenomics, a new discipline involving the characterization of a full set of phenotypes in a given species, has emerged as an alternative technology to come up with exponentially increasing genomic data in plant breeding programs. There are many advantages for using new technologies in phenomics. Yet, the necessity of diverse man power and huge funding for cutting-edge equipment prevent many researchers who are interested in this area from adopting this new technique in their research programs. Currently, only a limited number of groups mostly in developed countries have initiated phenomic studies using high throughput methods. In this short article, we describe the strategies to compete with those advanced groups using limited resources in developing countries, followed by a brief introduction of high throughput phenotyping.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Crop Science Conference
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• 2017.06a
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• pp.303-303
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• 2017

Japanese agriculture has faced to several threats: aging and decrease of farmer population, global competition, and the risk of climate change as well as harsh and variable weather. On the other hands, the number of large scale farms is increasing, because farm lands have been being aggregated to fewer numbers of farms. Cost cutting, development of efficient ways to manage complicatedly scattered farm lands, maintaining yield and quality under variable weather conditions, are required to adapt to changing environments. Information and communications technology (ICT) would contribute to solve such problems and to create innovative technologies. Thus we have been developing an early warning and decision support system to reduce weather and climate risks for rice, wheat and soybean production in Japan. The concept and prototype of the system will be shown. The system consists of a weather data system (Agro-Meteorological Grid Square Data System, AMGSDS), decision support contents where information is automatically created by crop models and delivers information to users via internet. AMGSDS combines JMA's Automated Meteorological Data Acquisition System (AMeDAS) data, numerical weather forecast data and normal values, for all of Japan with about 1km Grid Square throughout years. Our climate-smart system provides information on the prediction of crop phenology, created with weather forecast data and crop phenology models, as an important function. The system also makes recommendations for crop management, such as nitrogen-topdressing, suitable harvest time, water control, pesticide spray. We are also developing methods to perform risk analysis on weather-related damage to crop production. For example, we have developed an algorism to determine the best transplanting date in rice under a given environment, using the results of multi-year simulation, in order to answer the question "when is the best transplanting date to minimize yield loss, to avoid low temperature damage and to avoid high temperature damage?".

• Advances in robotics research
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.201-217
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• 2018

Agriculture production is a critical human intensive task, which takes place in all regions of the world. The process to grow and harvest crops is labor intensive in many countries due to the lack of automation and advanced technology. Much of the difficult, dangerous and dirty labor of crop production can be automated with intelligent and robotic platforms. We propose an intelligent, agent-oriented robotic team, which can enable the process of harvesting, gathering and collecting crops and fruits, of many types, from agricultural fields. This paper describes a novel robotic organization enabling humans, robots and agents to work together for automation of gathering and collection functions. The focus of the research is a model, called HARMS, which can enable Humans, software Agents, Robots, Machines and Sensors to work together indistinguishably. With this model, any capability-based human-like organization can be conceived and modeled, such as in manufacturing or agriculture. In this research, we model, design and implement a technology application of knowledge-based robot-to-robot and human-to-robot collaboration for an agricultural gathering and collection function. The gathering and collection functions were chosen as they are some of the most labor intensive and least automated processes in the process acquisition of agricultural products. The use of robotic organizations can reduce human labor and increase efficiency allowing people to focus on higher level tasks and minimizing the backbreaking tasks of agricultural production in the future. In this work, the HARMS model was applied to three different robotic instances and an integrated test was completed with satisfactory results that show the basic promise of this research.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 2017.04a
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• pp.45-45
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• 2017

On-site monitoring of vegetable growth parameters, such as leaf length, leaf area, and fresh weight, in an agricultural field can provide useful information for farmers to establish farm management strategies suitable for optimum production of vegetables. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are currently gaining a growing interest for agricultural applications. This study reports on validation testing of previously developed vegetable growth estimation models based on UAV-based RGB images for white radish and Chinese cabbage. Specific objective was to investigate the potential of the UAV-based RGB camera system for effectively quantifying temporal and spatial variability in the growth status of white radish and Chinese cabbage in a field. RGB images were acquired based on an automated flight mission with a multi-rotor UAV equipped with a low-cost RGB camera while automatically tracking on a predefined path. The acquired images were initially geo-located based on the log data of flight information saved into the UAV, and then mosaicked using a commerical image processing software. Otsu threshold-based crop coverage and DSM-based crop height were used as two predictor variables of the previously developed multiple linear regression models to estimate growth parameters of vegetables. The predictive capabilities of the UAV sensing system for estimating the growth parameters of the two vegetables were evaluated quantitatively by comparing to ground truth data. There were highly linear relationships between the actual and estimated leaf lengths, widths, and fresh weights, showing coefficients of determination up to 0.7. However, there were differences in slope between the ground truth and estimated values lower than 0.5, thereby requiring the use of a site-specific normalization method.

• Animal Bioscience
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.481-491
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• 2024

Objective: This study determined fermentation characteristics of commonly used feedstuffs, especially tropical roughages, for dairy cattle in Southeast Asia. This information is considered relevant in the context of the observed low milk fat content and milk production in Southeast Asia countries. Methods: A total of 29 feedstuffs commonly used for dairy cattle in Vietnam and Thailand were chemically analysed and subjected to an in vitro gas production (GP) test. For 72 h, GP was continuously recorded with fully automated equipment and methane (CH₄) was measured at 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 24, 30, 36, 48, 60, and 72 h of incubation. A triphasic, nonlinear, regression procedure was applied to analyse GP profiles while a monophasic model was used to obtain kinetics related to CH₄ production. Results: King grass and VA06 showed a high asymptotic GP related to the soluble- and non-soluble fractions (i.e. A1 and A2, respectively) and had the highest acetate to propionate ratio in the incubation fluid. The proportion of CH₄ produced (% of GP at 72 h) was found to be not different (p>0.05) between the various grasses. Among the selected preserved roughages (n = 6) and whole crops (n = 4), sorghum was found to produce the greatest amount of gas in combination with a relatively low CH₄ production. Conclusion: Grasses belonging to the genus Pennisetum, and whole crop sorghum can be considered as suitable ingredients to formulate dairy rations to enhance milk fat content in Vietnam/Thailand.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.319-327
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• 2016

Purpose: Automated guidance systems (AGSs) for mobile farm machinery have several advantages over manual operation in the crop production industry. Many researchers and companies have tried to develop such a system. However, it is not easy to evaluate the performance of an AGS because there is no established device used to evaluate it that complies with the ISO 12188 standard. The objective of this study was to develop a tracking sensor system using five laser distance measurement sensors. Methods: One sensor-for long-range distance measurement-was used to measure travel distance and velocity. The other four sensors-for mid-range distance measurement-were used to measure lateral deviation. Stationary, manual driving, and A-B line tests were conducted, and the results were compared with the real-time kinematic differential global positioning system (RTK-DGPS) signal used by the AGS. Results: For the stationary test, the average error of the tracking sensor system was 1.99 mm, and the average error of the RTK-DGPS was 15.19 mm. For the two types of driving tests, the data trends were similar. A comparison of the changes in lateral deviation showed that the data stability of the developed tracking system was better. Conclusions: Although the tracking system was not capable of measuring long travel distances under strong sunlight illumination because of the long-range sensor's limitations, this dilemma could be overcome using a higher-performance sensor.

• Journal of Environmental Science International
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• v.27 no.7
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• pp.509-518
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• 2018

Weather is the most influential factor for crop cultivation. Weather information for cultivated areas is necessary for growth and production forecasting of agricultural crops. However, there are limitations in the meteorological observations in cultivated areas because weather equipment is not installed. This study tested methods of predicting the daily mean temperature in onion fields using geostatistical models. Three models were considered: inverse distance weight method, generalized additive model, and Bayesian spatial linear model. Data were collected from the AWS (automatic weather system), ASOS (automated synoptic observing system), and an agricultural weather station between 2013 and 2016. To evaluate the prediction performance, data from AWS and ASOS were used as the modeling data, and data from the agricultural weather station were used as the validation data. It was found that the Bayesian spatial linear regression performed better than other models. Consequently, high-resolution maps of the daily mean temperature of Jeonnam were generated using all observed weather information.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.293-300
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• 2000

Automated greenhouse production system often require crop growth monitoring involving accurate quantification of plant physiological properties. Conventional methods are usually burdensome, inaccurate, and harmful to crops. A thermal image analysis system can accomplish rapid and accurate measurements of physiological-property changes of stressed crops. In this research a thermal imaging system was used to measure the leaf-temperature changes of several crops according to nutrient stresses. Thermal images were obtained from lettuce, cucumber, and pepper plants. Plants were placed in growth chamber to provide relatively constant growth environment. Results showed that there were significant differences in the temperature of stressed plants and non-stressed plants. In a case of the both N deficiency and excess, the leaf temperatures of cucumber were $2^{\circ}C$ lower than controlled temperature. The leaf temperature of cucumber was $2^{\circ}C$ lower than controlled temperature only when it was under N excess stress. For the potassium deficiency or excess stress, the leaf temperaures of cucumber and hot pepper were $2^{\circ}C$ lower than controls, respectively. The phosphorous deficiency stress dropped the leaf temperatures of cucumber and hot pepper $2^{\circ}C$ and $1.5^{\circ}C$ below than controls. However, the leaf temperature of lettuce did not change. It was possible to detect the changes in leaf temperature by infrared thermography when subjected to nutrition stress. Since the changes in leaf temperatures were different each other for plants and kinds of stresses, however, it is necessary to add a nutrient measurement system to a plant-growth monitoring system using thermography.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.94-103
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• 2022

Weeds bring disadvantages to crops since they can damage them, and a clean treatment with less pollution and contamination should be developed. Artificial intelligence gives new hope to agriculture to achieve smart farming. This study delivers an automated weeds growth point detection using deep learning. This study proposes a combination of semantic graphics for generating data annotation and U-Net with pre-trained deep learning as a backbone for locating the growth point of the weeds on the given field scene. The dataset was collected from an actual field. We measured the intersection over union, f1-score, precision, and recall to evaluate our method. Moreover, Mobilenet V2 was chosen as the backbone and compared with Resnet 34. The results showed that the proposed method was accurate enough to detect the growth point and handle the brightness variation. The best performance was achieved by Mobilenet V2 as a backbone with IoU 96.81%, precision 97.77%, recall 98.97%, and f1-score 97.30%.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Crop Science Conference
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• 2017.06a
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• pp.252-252
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• 2017

Nowadays water shortage is becoming one of the biggest problems in the Korea. Many different methods are developed for conservation of water. Soil water management has become the most indispensable factor for augmenting the crop productivity especially on soybean (Glycine max L.) because of their high susceptibility to both water stress and water logging at various growth stages. The farmers have been using irrigation techniques through manual control which farmers irrigate lands at regular intervals. Automatic irrigation systems are convenient, especially for those who need to travel. If automatic irrigation systems are installed and programmed properly, they can even save you money and help in water conservation. Automatic irrigation systems can be programmed to provide automatic irrigation to the plants which helps in saving money and water and to discharge more precise amounts of water in a targeted area, which promotes water conservation. The objective of this study was to determine the possible effect of automatic irrigation systems based on soil moisture on soybean growth. This experiment was conducted on an upland field with sandy loam soils in Department of Southern Area Crop, NICS, RDA. The study had three different irrigation methods; sprinkle irrigation (SI), surface drip irrigation (SDI) and fountain irrigation (FI). SI was installed at spacing of $7{\times}7m$ and $1.8m^3/hr$ as square for per irrigation plot, a lateral pipe of SDI was laid down to 1.2 m row spacing with $2.3L\;h^{-1}$ discharge rate, the distance between laterals was 20 cm spacing between drippers and FI was laid down in 3m interval as square for per irrigation plot. Soybean (Daewon) cultivar was sown in the June $20^{th}$, 2016, planted in 2 rows of apart in 1.2 m wide rows and distance between hills was 20 cm. All agronomic practices were done as the recommended cultivation. This automatic irrigation system had valves to turn irrigation on/off easily by automated controller, solenoids and moisture sensor which were set the reference level as available soil moisture levels of 30% at 10cm depth. The efficiency of applied irrigation was obtained by dividing the total water stored in the effective root zone to the applied irrigation water. Results showed that seasonal applied irrigation water amounts were $60.4ton\;10a^{-1}$ (SI), $47.3ton\;10a^{-1}$ (SDI) and $92.6 ton\;10a^{-1}$ (FI), respectively. The most significant advantage of SDI system was that water was supplied near the root zone of plants drip by drip. This system saved a large quantity of water by 27.5% and 95.6% compared to SI, FI system. The average soybean yield was significantly affected by different irrigation methods. The soybean yield by different irrigation methods were $309.7kg\;10a^{-1}$ from SDI $282.2kg\;10a^{-1}$ from SI, $289.4kg\;10a^{-1}$ from FI, and $206.3kg\;10a^{-1}$ from control, respectively. SDI resulted in increase of soybean yield by 50.1%, 7.0% 9.8% compared to non-irrigation (control), FI and SI, respectively. Therefore, the automatic irrigation system supplied water only when the soil moisture in the soil went below the reference. Due to the direct transfer of water to the roots water conservation took place and also helped to maintain the moisture to soil ratio at the root zone constant. Thus the system is efficient and compatible to changing environment. The automatic irrigation system provides with several benefits and can operate with less manpower. In conclusion, improving automatic irrigation system can contribute greatly to reducing production costs of crops and making the industry more competitive and sustainable.