The future of phenotyping for crop breeding and agricultural production will likely involve cooperation between autonomous aerial and ground-based vehicles. Consideration of this advance in autonomous systems is relatively new in the academic literature, particularly in relation to agriculture. Areas of study to date have included the broadly applied concepts of environment perception and modeling, autonomous cooperation, collaborative position control, and path planning. Multiple opportunities are emerging for the technology to be advantageous in agriculture. An example includes using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for remote sensing in cooperation with an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that will perform ground-based activities in accord with analysis of the remote-sensing data. This case could be applied in mapping and mitigation of insects and weeds as well as harvesting according to variations in crop yield and maturity. Another example includes using a UGV to serve as an autonomous ground-control point in order to maximize the accuracy of UAV remote-sensing data. Ongoing research in this area has shown major improvements in the accuracy of measurements of plant reflectance, height, and temperature, not to mention improvements in georectification.
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