Daniel Petti

Although season‐long cotton flowering time characterization has value to breeders and growers, a manual data collection process is too laborious to be practical in most cases. In recent years, several fully automated flower counting approaches have been proposed. However, such approaches are typically designed to run offline and require a significant amount of computation. Furthermore, little thought has gone into developing convenient interfaces and integrations so that a layperson can use such systems without extensive training. The goal of this study is to develop a flower tracking system that is deployable on a ground robot and can operate in real time. A previous GCNNMatch++ approach was modified to increase the inference speed. Additionally, data from multiple cameras were fused to avoid canopy occlusions, and three‐dimensional flower locations were extracted by integrating GPS data from the robot. It is shown that the approach significantly outperforms UAV‐based counting and single‐camera counting while running at above 40 FPS on an edge device, achieving a counting error of 15. Overall, it is believed that the highly integrated, automated, and simplified flower counting solution makes significant strides toward a practical commercial cotton phenotyping platform.

Societal Impact Statement: Plant breeding is a critical tool for increasing the productivity, climate resilience, and sustainability of agriculture, but current phenotyping methods are a bottleneck due to the amount of human labor involved. Here, we demonstrate high‐throughput phenotyping with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to analyze the season‐long flowering pattern in cotton, subsequently mapping relevant genetic factors underpinning the trait. Season‐long flowering is a complex trait, with implications for adaptation of perennials to specific environments. We believe our approach can improve the speed and efficacy of breeding for a variety of woody perennials.Summary: Many perennial plants make important contributions to agroeconomies and agroecosystems but have complex architecture and/or long flowering duration that hinders measurement and selection. Iteratively tracking productivity over a long flowering/fruiting season may permit the identification of genetic factors conferring different reproductive strategies that might be successful in different environments, ranging from rapid early maturation that avoids stresses, to late maturation that utilizes the full seasonal duration to maximize productivity. In cotton, a perennial plant that is generally cultivated as an annual crop, we apply aerial imagery and deep learning methods to novel and stable genetic stocks, identifying genetic factors influencing the duration and rate of fruiting. Our phenotyping method was able to identify 24 QTLs that affect flowering behavior in cotton. A total of five of these corresponded to previously identified QTLs from other studies. While these factors may have different relationships with crop productivity and quality in different environments, their determination adds potentially important information to breeding decisions. With transfer learning of the deep learning models, this approach could be applied widely, potentially improving gains from selection in diverse perennial shrubs and trees essential to sustainable agricultural intensification.

The traditional approach to curating and disseminating information about agricultural injuries relies heavily on manual input and review, resulting in a labor-intensive process. While the unstructured nature of the material traditionally requires human reviewers, the recent proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced the potential for automation. This study investigates the feasibility and implications of filling the role of a human reviewer with an LLM in analyzing information about agricultural injuries from news articles and investigation reports. Multiple language models were tested for accuracy in extracting relevant incident and victim information, and these models include OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 and an open-source fine-tuned version of Llama 2. To measure accuracy, each LLM was given prompts to gather relevant data from a set of randomly selected online news articles already cataloged by human reviewers, such as the use of drugs or alcohol, time of day, or other information about the victim(s). Results showed that the fine-tuned Llama2 was the most proficient model with an average accuracy of 93% and some categories reaching 100%. ChatGPT-4 also performed well with around 90% accuracy. Additionally, we found that the fine-tuned Llama2 model was somewhat proficient in coding injuries using the OIICS classification scheme, achieving 48% accuracy when predicting the first digit. Though none of the models are perfectly accurate, the methodology and results prove that LLMs are promising in streamlining workflows in order to reduce human and financial resources and increase the efficiency of data analysis.

Although season-long cotton flower counts have value to breeders and growers, a manual data collection process is too laborious to be practical in most cases. In recent years, several fully automated flower counting approaches have been proposed. However, such approaches are typically designed to run offline and require a significant amount of computation. Furthermore, little thought has gone into developing convenient interfaces and integrations so that a layperson can use such systems without extensive training. The goal of this study is to develop a lightweight flower tracking system that is deployable on a ground robot and can operate in real-time. We modify a previous GCNNMatch++ approach to increase the inference speed. Additionally, we fuse data from multiple cameras in order to avoid canopy occlusions, and extract three-dimensional flower locations by integrating GPS data from the robot. We show that our approach significantly outperforms UAV-based counting and single-camera counting while running at above 40 FPS on an edge device, achieving a counting error of 15% and an average localization error of 19 cm. This level of performance is enough to observe significant differences in flowering behavior between genotypes. Overall, we believe that our highly-integrated, automated, and simplified flower counting solution makes significant strides towards a practical commercial cotton phenotyping platform.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is poised to revolutionize a variety of sectors, including healthcare, finance, transportation, and education. Within healthcare, AGI is being utilized to analyze clinical medical notes, recognize patterns in patient data, and aid in patient management. Agriculture is another critical sector that impacts the lives of individuals worldwide. It serves as a foundation for providing food, fiber, and fuel, yet faces several challenges, such as climate change, soil degradation, water scarcity, and food security. AGI has the potential to tackle these issues by enhancing crop yields, reducing waste, and promoting sustainable farming practices. It can also help farmers make informed decisions by leveraging real-time data, leading to more efficient and effective farm management. This paper delves into the potential future applications of AGI in agriculture, such as agriculture image processing, natural language processing (NLP), robotics, knowledge graphs, and infrastructure, and their impact on precision livestock and precision crops. By leveraging the power of AGI, these emerging technologies can provide farmers with actionable insights, allowing for optimized decision-making and increased productivity. The transformative potential of AGI in agriculture is vast, and this paper aims to highlight its potential to revolutionize the industry.