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In a world with great challenges in food security, optimising cereal production is critical. Cereals are the most important food source for human consumption. The fourth important cereal worldwide after wheat, rice and maize, is Barley, and its production strongly depends on fertilization treatments. The adoption of suitable fertilizer management strategies often results in large economic benefits to producers. However, determining optimal fertilizer doses for a specific barley variety is complex. The collection of data and their analyses can be cost prohibitive for small farmers regarding time and money. This paper introduces an approach to support producers with automatic tools for the analysis of fertilization management of barley. The proposed methodology aims to simultaneously estimate nitrogen fertilization and barley yield, from information derived from aerial RGB images captured by a UAV. Our long term goal is to provide a low-cost and wide-are-coverage solution for the estimation of barley variables that can be leveraged to increase barley yield without increasing costs. A low-cost UAV is used to capture RGB crop field images. Then, a deep convolutional neural network is used for the automated extraction of features from the images. Extracted features are feed into predictive models that estimate the variables of interest. Experimental results reveal that the proposed methodology is able to reach an accuracy above 83% when estimating nitrogen fertilization and a high correlation and low RMSE in the estimation of yield in grams. Experimental results are promising and will pave the way for the development of deep learning methods for barley analysis from aerial imagery that can be accessed by the average farmer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the problem of robust regulation of a Planar Vertical Takeoff and Landing (PVTOL) aircraft affected by crosswind disturbances. The proposed approach simultaneously exploits the advantages of passivity-based control and the integral sliding mode (ISM) control technique. We demonstrate that the passivity-based controller accomplishes the PVTOL regulation within a guaranteed stability region. At the same time, the ISM controller can effectively counteract the undesirable disturbances effect from the beginning of the operation since the disturbances are never seen in the measurable output. Using the passivity approach with LaSalle's Invariance Theorem, we construct the required Lyapunov function to establish the closed-loop system stability. The proposed combination of controllers results in a robust system that satisfactorily solves the regulation problem. Numerical simulations are provided to show that the proposed approach allows the tracking of different reference signals: pulse-train shaped trajectory and ellipse-shaped trajectory, considering the presence of perturbations (crosswind). Furthermore, to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique, a comparative analysis considering two robust control strategies is provided., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Aguilar-Ibanez et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)