Latest News

We are pleased to announce that two papers led by our master’s students have been accepted. Quan Zhao (first author) and colleagues present a VLM-driven framework for active obstacle separation in robotic harvesting.

We are delighted to announce the acceptance of a paper to IEEE ICRA 2026, marking a remarkable achievement led by Xi Chen, an undergraduate intern from China Agricultural University. Co-first authored with Master’s student Yun Wang, their work on the “Hybrid Rigid-Soft Robotic Gripper with Shape Adaptation, Uniform Force Distribution, and Self-Locking Capabilities” will be presented in Vienna.

A paper led by master student Nengwei Yang, titled “PHDT-DETR: A Lightweight End-to-End Detector for On-Device Truss Tomato Detection in Greenhouses,” has been published in Smart Agricultural Technology. The study proposes the PHDT-DETR, a streamlined detection model that maintains accuracy while being efficient enough to run in real-time on embedded devices within greenhouses, facilitating scalable robotic scouting and harvesting.

A paper led by PhD student Shimin Hu, titled “Calibration-enhanced multi-view RGB-D vision for robust recognition and 3D localization of strawberries under occlusions,” has been accepted by Computers and Electronics in Agriculture.

A paper led by PhD student Meili Sun, titled “Light-resilient visual regression of strawberry ripeness for robotic harvesting,” has been accepted for publication in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture. The research introduces a robust visual regression model that maintains high accuracy in judging strawberry ripeness under varying greenhouse light conditions.

On October 20, 2025, the IROS Workshop on Agricultural Robotics (Agrirobotics), co-organized by Dr. Ya Xiong alongside leading experts from Wageningen University, University of Lincoln, and Northwest A&F University, was successfully held at the top-tier robotics conference IROS.

A paper led by PhD student Lichao Yang, titled “High-Tolerance Soft-Rigid Gripper for Low-Damage Robotic Strawberry Harvesting,” has been published in the prestigious journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).

A paper led by Zhicheng Hu, titled “Strawberry bruise susceptibility analysis based on discrete element method coupled with finite element simulation,” has been accepted for publication in Postharvest Biology and Technology.

From September 15-16, 2025, the “2025 Pepper Industry (Jize) High-Quality Development Conference” was successfully held in Handan, Hebei Province. The conference served as a key platform for industry exchange, focusing on the standardization and brand development of the pepper industry.

A paper led by PhD student Tianxiao Zhu, titled “Five-degree-of-freedom strawberry pose estimation using key points and oriented bounding box detection,” has been published in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture.