Work Efficiency Analysis of Multiple Heterogeneous Robots for Harvesting Crops in Smart Greenhouses
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This manuscript presents a detailed analysis of the work efficiency of robots involved in greenhouse crops harvesting tasks. A simplified model has been established and validated through greenhouse experiments. Overall, this manuscript is well-structured with essential literature review and clear elaboration of the model establishing. The methods are generally appropriate, the analysis in this work may potentially provide a guidance for the formation of a heterogeneous robot fleet. This reviewer recommends minor revision with the following comments:
1) In line 78, please specify if the greenhouse structure applies to all greenhouses or only refers to a certain type of greenhouse. For the greenhouses with no rails set between the beds, is the proposed model still applicable?
2) Please make the capital letters consistent in the manuscript, in Fig 3 ‘manipulator’ should be ‘Manipulator’, in Fig 6 â‘¥ ‘crop’ should be ‘Crop’;
3) In line 278, ‘deliever’ should be ‘deliver’?
4) In line 297, considering the harvest time highly depends on the distance between the robot hand position and the target crop position, please specify how this ‘20s’ harvest time is obtained, is it calculated by averaging multiple measurements? How many times did the operator repeat the measurement?
5) It is recommended that a brief discussion of other factors related to the transport robot adoption to be mentioned in the discussion/conclusion section, such as cost (both device cost and maintenance cost), power consumption, etc.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Also, the same content as the attached file is also written below.
=============================================
To,
Reviewer 1,
We thank the reviewer for the time and effort put in toward reviewing this manuscript. The insightful comments and suggestions have helped improve the manuscript significantly. We have incorporated several changes based on the suggestions of the reviewer. The detailed responses to the reviewer’s comments are given below.
Comments :
1) In line 78, please specify if the greenhouse structure applies to all greenhouses or only refers
to a certain type of greenhouse. For the greenhouses with no rails set between the beds, is the
proposed model still applicable?
⇒ Section ‘5. We thank the reviewer for the insightful suggestion. The Discussion’ section has been added to the revised manuscript. We emphasized on the generality of the proposed method in this section. The revised text is as follows:
“This study is applicable to general smart greenhouses with rails. The two-dimensional size and the length of the bed of the greenhouse are primarily used to calculate the work efficiency . A typical smart greenhouse, shown in Fig. 1, can be modeled using the method derived in this study. However, it should be noted that in practical applications, the pipe spacing of the smart greenhouse is not standardized. To address this issue, the developed mobile platform has a wheel mechanism similar to that of a train, and it can be used for various pipe spacings in the range 400–600 mm.”
2) Please make the capital letters consistent in the manuscript, in Fig 3 ‘manipulator’ should
be ‘Manipulator’, in Fig 6 â‘¥ ‘crop’ should be ‘Crop’;
⇒ We have made the suggested changes in Fig. 3 and Fig. 6. Further, we changed Fig. 2 to help the readers understand the environment better.
3) In line 278, ‘deliever’ should be ‘deliver’?
⇒ We apologize for the issue in the previous manuscript. We have corrected the typo in the revised manuscript. We have proofread the manuscript again and ensured that there are no such typos.
4) In line 297, considering the harvest time highly depends on the distance between the robot
hand position and the target crop position, please specify how this ‘20s’ harvest time is obtained,
is it calculated by averaging multiple measurements? How many times did the operator repeat
the measurement?
⇒ We understand the concern raised by the reviewer. We have explained the crop-picking sequence in detail on lines 302 – 309. The time ‘20s’ is given by the programmer in accordance with the performance of the robot in picking crops.
“The crop harvesting procedure is programmed as shown in Fig. 6. Because the robot's unit motion is determined by inputting time and target location, the time required to harvest one crop is almost the same. Fig. 6 sequentially shows the required time and process for harvesting tomatoes using the developed harvesting robot. Currently, it is possible to reduce this time. According to the performance of the robot being used, less time is required for a unit operation, and the procedure for harvesting can also be simplified. However, the purpose of this study is not to shorten the harvest time but to check the efficiency when using multiple robots of different types.”
5) It is recommended that a brief discussion of other factors related to the transport robot
adoption to be mentioned in the discussion/conclusion section, such as cost (both device cost
and maintenance cost), power consumption, etc.
⇒ We have added Section ‘5. Discussion’ to the revised manuscript and explained the limitations of the proposed method as well as the system properties in this section. Because the model is being developed for research purposes, the cost is not considered currently. For example, the developed robots use lithium-ion batteries, which are superior to lead-acid batteries in terms of performance and space, but are relatively costlier.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
This manuscript entitled “Work Efficiency Analysis of Multiple Heterogeneous Robots for Harvesting Crops in Smart Greenhouses”, it focused in analyze the work efficiency of an unmanned harvesting and transporting system using harvesting and transporting robots, when the entire facility is to be harvested.
The topic is of importance in agricultural engineering and environmental sciences. Although the scientific issue is well raised at the beginning as Introduction and Modeling of harvesting ......... ( Section 2 with sup-sections), the Results / findings as well as discussion are not sufficiently described in this paper and the mechanisms that they induce in development of harvesting robot and transporting robot system. I suggest, make a new section as Results and Discussion, and to described it the direction of your research, and Findings and comparison with prior studies, limitations of your work, casual arguments and deductive arguments. Conclusion needs re-write, with a well-constructed. please!!
I have marked several suggestions on the electronic copy of the paper, which need to be attended in the emendation of the paper
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Also, the same content as the attached file is also written below.
=============================================
To,
Reviewer 2,
We thank the reviewer for the time and effort put in toward reviewing this manuscript. The insightful comments and suggestions have helped improve the manuscript significantly. We have incorporated several changes based on the suggestions of the reviewer. The detailed responses to the reviewer’s comments are given below.
Comments : “The topic is of importance in agricultural engineering and environmental sciences. Although the scientific issue is well raised at the beginning as Introduction and Modeling of harvesting ......... ( Section 2 with sup-sections), the Results / findings as well as discussion are not sufficiently described in this paper and the mechanisms that they induce in development of harvesting robot and transporting robot system. I suggest, make a new section as Results and Discussion, and to described it the direction of your research, and Findings and comparison with prior studies, limitations of your work, casual arguments and deductive arguments. Conclusion needs re-write, with a well-constructed. please!!”
I have marked several suggestions on the electronic copy of the paper, which need to be attended in the emendation of the paper
⇒ We thank the reviewer for the detailed and thorough review of the manuscript and for the insightful comments. Based on the comment of the reviewer, Section ‘5. Discussion’ has been added to the revised manuscript, wherein we explained and discussed the limitations of the proposed method and the system properties in detail. Further, we have rewritten the ‘Abstract’ and ‘Conclusion’ sections.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
This paper wants to prove that multi-robot collaboration works. The authors make a great many assumptions to support the idea that multiple robots working together can increase efficiency.
1. The introduction section needs to add research on multi-robot co-working in other areas or agriculture areas. Much research work has been done in this area, such as “Research Progress on Synergistic Technologies of Agricultural Multi-Robots”, “An Overview of Cooperative Robotics in Agriculture”, and “Cooperative aerial-ground multi-robot system for automated construction tasks”.
2. The efficiency of harvesting robots is not a fixed value, is there specific research work or experiments that give the efficiency of individual harvesting robots? I can't see the unit picking yield of individual harvesting robots, which is important to support the assumptions made throughout the article.
3. How soon will the harvesting robot transfer the picked fruit to the transport robot? What is the transport strategy of the transport robots, waiting until the transporter has reached its maximum capacity for return? These need to be given in the method section.
4. Many assumptions are given in this paper, but they are not verified to be correct by the conclusions. Field experiments or simulations should be carried out. And in this paper, the harvesting robot and the transporter have been presented, and you have enough devices to finish field tests to verify your assumption. This part was not seen in the experiments and the conclusions are not supported by data.
5. Language should be improved to remove typos and incorrect or incomplete expressions.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Also, the same content as the attached file is also written below.
=============================================
To,
Reviewer 3,
We thank the reviewer for the time and effort put in toward reviewing this manuscript. The insightful comments and suggestions have helped improve the manuscript significantly. We have incorporated several changes based on the suggestions of the reviewer. The detailed responses to the reviewer’s comments are given below.
Comments :
- The introduction section needs to add research on multi-robot co-working in other areas or agriculture areas. Much research work has been done in this area, such as “Research Progress on Synergistic Technologies of Agricultural Multi-Robots”, “An Overview of Cooperative Robotics in Agriculture”, and “Cooperative aerial-ground multi-robot system for automated construction tasks”.
⇒ We thank the reviewer for the insightful comment and for suggesting the related work. After a thorough review of the highlighted study, we found that it was related to field agricultural robots, and it focused on the role sharing and cooperation methods of multiple robots to achieve the ultimate goals. There was no mention of work efficiency when using the harvesting robot and the transfer robot in the facility horticulture intended in this study.
Line 61-65 are added like:
“Because the research on the field agricultural robot is more exhaustive and the required functions are more complex compared to that on the facility robot, there have been several studies on the cooperation of the field agricultural robot [14-16]. However, these studies primarily focus on the role of each robot and the way of cooperation, and they do not emphasize on the work efficiency.”
- The efficiency of harvesting robots is not a fixed value, is there specific research work or experiments that give the efficiency of individual harvesting robots? I can't see the unit picking yield of individual harvesting robots, which is important to support the assumptions made throughout the article.
⇒ We understand the concern raised by the reviewer. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous works have highlighted the efficiency of individual harvesting robots. In our research, Team2 consists of only the harvesting robot, and (13) describes the work efficiency of individual harvesting robot.
- How soon will the harvesting robot transfer the picked fruit to the transport robot? What is the transport strategy of the transport robots, waiting until the transporter has reached its maximum capacity for return? These need to be given in the method section.
⇒ We understand the concern raised by the reviewer. We have answered the questions on Lines 214-222 in the revised manuscript. A detailed explanation of the same has also been given in Section 5 of discussion.
- Many assumptions are given in this paper, but they are not verified to be correct by the conclusions. Field experiments or simulations should be carried out. And in this paper, the harvesting robot and the transporter have been presented, and you have enough devices to finish field tests to verify your assumption. This part was not seen in the experiments and the conclusions are not supported by data.
⇒ The purpose of this paper is to model the working efficiency when using multiple robots. Currently, only the harvesting and transporting robots exist; thus, the work efficiency based on the combination of the two types of robots was theoretically explained. From the proposed work efficiency model, it was shown that the combination of the harvesting robot and the transporting robot could have higher work efficiency than single harvesting robots. The proposed model can provide a rough guide when forming a team with multiple robots.
To experimentally validate the proposed theory, at least three harvesting robots and one transfer robot are required (team1:[2 harvesting robots, 1 transporting robot], team2: [3 harvesting robots]). Thus, we are conducting constant research and performing several experiments on this concept. In the next study, we aim to develop the multi-robot cooperation technology for n-harvesting robot and m-transporting robot for harvesting crops in general smart greenhouse.
- Language should be improved to remove typos and incorrect or incomplete expressions.
⇒ We apologize for the issues in the previous manuscript. We have rectified this issue in the revised manuscript, and we ensured that there are no other errors. We have consulted “Editage” for the proofreading of this document.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Authors has been succeeded to revised their paper, is acceptable.
Reviewer 3 Report
I have no more question. The authors addressed most of my concerns and I believe it is ready to be published.
