Abstract
Emergent and established paradigms, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and fog/edge computing, together with increasingly cheaper computing technologies – with very low power requirements, available to exchange data with increased efficiency – and intelligent systems, have evolved to a level where it is virtually possible to create and deploy monitoring solutions, even in Precision Agriculture (PA) practices. In this work, LoRa®(Long Range) technology and LoRaWAN™protocol, are tested in a Precision Viticulture (PV) scenario, using low-power data acquisition devices deployed in a vineyard in the UTAD University Campus, distanced 400 m away from the nearest gateway. The main goal of this work is to evaluate sensor data integration in the mySense environment, a framework aimed to systematize data acquisition procedures to address common PA/PV issues, using LoRa®technology. mySense builds over a 4-layer technological structure: sensor and sensor nodes, crop field and sensor networks, cloud services and front-end applications. It makes available a set of free tools based on the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) concept and enables the use of low-cost platforms to quickly prototype a complete PA/PV monitoring application. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

Abstract
Nature inspired metaheuristics algorithms have been the target of several studies in the most varied scientific areas due to their high efficiency in solving real world problems. This is also the case of agriculture. Among the most well-established nature inspired metaheuristics the ones selected to be addressed in this work are the following: genetic algorithms, differential evolution, simulated annealing, harmony search, particle swarm optimization, ant colony optimization, firefly algorithm and bat algorithm. For each of them, the mechanism that inspired it and a brief description of its operation is presented, followed by a review of their most relevant agricultural applications. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

Abstract
Labour shortage is a reality in agriculture. Farmers are asking for solutions to automate agronomic tasks, such as monitoring, pruning, spraying, and harvesting. The automation of these tasks requires, most of the time, the use of robotic arms to mimic human arms capabilities. The current robotic arm based solutions available, both in the market and in the scientific sphere, have several limitations, such as, low-speed manipulation, the path planning algorithms are not aware of the requirements of the agricultural tasks (robotic motion and manipulation synchronisation), and require active perception tuning to the end-target point. This work benchmarks algorithms from open manipulation planning library (OMPL) considering a cost-effective six-degree freedom manipulator in a simulated vineyard. The OMPL planners shown a very low performance under demanding pruning tasks. The best and most promising results are performed and obtained by BiTRRT. However, further work is needed to increase its performance and reduce planning time. This benchmark work helps the reader to understand the limitations of each algorithm and when to use them. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
Steep slope vineyards are a complex scenario for the development of ground robots due to the harsh terrain conditions and unstable localization systems. Automate vineyard tasks (like monitoring, pruning, spraying, and harvesting) requires advanced robotic path planning approaches. These approaches usually resort to Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques to acquire environment information, which requires previous navigation of the robot through the entire vineyard. The analysis of satellite or aerial images could represent an alternative to SLAM techniques, to build the first version of occupation grid map (needed by robots). The state of the art for aerial vineyard images analysis is limited to flat vineyards with straight vine’s row. This work considers a machine learning based approach (SVM classifier with Local Binary Pattern (LBP) based descriptor) to perform the vineyard segmentation from public satellite imagery. In the experiments with a dataset of satellite images from vineyards of Douro region, the proposed method achieved accuracy over 90%. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

Abstract
Monocular Visual Odometry techniques represent a challenging and appealing research area in robotics navigation field. The use of a single camera to track robot motion is a hardware-cheap solution. In this context, there are few Visual Odometry methods on the literature that estimate robot pose accurately using a single camera without any other source of information. The use of omnidirectional cameras in this field is still not consensual. Many works show that for outdoor environments the use of them does represent an improvement compared with the use of conventional perspective cameras. Besides that, in this work we propose an open-source monocular omnidirectional version of the state-of-the-art method Libviso2 that outperforms the original one even in outdoor scenes. This approach is suitable for central dioptric omnidirectional cameras and takes advantage of their wider field of view to calculate the robot motion with a really positive performance on the context of monocular Visual Odometry. We also propose a novel approach to calculate the scale factor that uses matches between laser measures and 3-D triangulated feature points to do so. The novelty of this work consists in the association of the laser ranges with the features on the omnidirectional image. Results were generate using three open-source datasets built in-house showing that our unified system largely outperforms the original monocular version of Libviso2.

Abstract
Viticulturists need to obtain the estimation of productivity map during the grape vine harvesting, to understand in detail the vineyard variability. An accurate productivity map will support the farmer to take more informed and accurate intervention in the vineyard in line with the precision viticulture concept. This work presents a novel solution to measure the productivity during vineyard harvesting operation realized by a grape harvesting machine. We propose 2D LIDAR sensor attached to low cost IoT module located inside the harvesting machine, to estimate the volume of grapes. Besides, it is proposed data methodology to process data collected and productivity map, considering GIS software, expecting to support the winemakers decisions. A PCD map is also used to validate the method developed by comparison. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.