Editors

About the Editor

Dr. Zhao Zhang is a Professor at Key Lab of Modern Precision Agricultural System Integration Research, Ministry of Education, China Agricultural University, Beijing. Before joining his current position, Dr. Zhao Zhang worked with Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, North Dakota State University (NDSU), USA, as a research assistant professor. His major research direction relates to sensing and automation in agriculture, focusing on applying and developing innovative technologies (e.g., UAVs and ground vehicle-based sensors) to support sustainable agriculture. Projects going on include, but are not limited to, using drone imagery for automatic crop disease detection and growth condition monitoring. In addition, he collaborates with a startup on developing an automatic rock picker. One project is to develop a proximal sensing system to recognize rocks and then guide an end-effector to the target rock. Before joining NDSU, he worked in the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Sugarbeet and Bean Research Unit at East Lansing, Michigan. His research focused on the development of innovative engineering technologies for harvesting and automated grading and sorting of apples in the orchard. He was primarily involved with system integration, as well as automatic control design and implementation. His research interests also included cost-benefit analysis of adopting mechanical harvest aid/sorting machines. He was a co-inventor for the infield sorting system (US Patent 9,919,345). In addition, he worked on the development and integration of an innovative apple harvest robot. Before joining USDA/ARS, he had completed his Ph.D. studies in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. His Ph.D. research was focused on developing a low-cost apple harvest-assist unit to improve labor productivity and decrease pickers’ occupational injuries. He earned both his M.S. and B.S. from Northwest A&F University in Agricultural Mechanization Engineering and Industrial Design Engineering, respectively. Zhao Zhang’s M.S. research was focused on agricultural machinery design and optimization, as well as agricultural mechanization strategy and policy evaluation. His undergraduate senior design project was related to smart furniture design.

Dr. Yiannis Ampatzidis began as an Assistant Professor in 2017 and leads a research and extension precision agriculture engineering program in the Southwest Florida Research and Education Center (SWFREC) in Immokalee, Florida. Dr. Ampatzidis received his B.S. in Agriculture Science in 2002 from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) in Thessaloniki, Greece, with a major in row crops and ecology. After completing his bachelor’s degree, Dr. Ampatzidis enrolled in the Agricultural Engineering department and completed his M.S. in 2005 with an emphasis in precision agriculture and robotics. At the same time, he completed his second bachelor’s degree in Hydraulics, Soil Science and Agricultural Engineering in 2008 (AUTH). He received his Ph.D. in Agricultural Engineering from AUTH in 2010 with an emphasis on precision agriculture and automation for specialty crops.  Dr. Ampatzidis works in the area of mechanization and automation of specialty crop production. He focuses on the design, development, and testing of sensors and control systems for optimal management of inputs, resources, and products. Dr. Ampatzidis’ current research focuses on mechanical harvesting of specialty crops, mechatronics, artificial intelligence, machine vision, precision agriculture, precision irrigation, smart machines, UAVs and machine systems. Dr. Ampatzidis has a special interest in development, implementation, and evaluation of agricultural machines and control systems for high-value crops (precision agriculture applications, remote sensing, embedded systems developing and programming, UAVs-drones, GIS applications).

In the combined extension and research program, he collaborates with other faculty and research partners, creating synergy both inside and outside of the University of Florida to provide leadership in precision agriculture, automation, and robotics.

Dr. Paulo Flores is an Assistant Professor in Precision Agriculture at the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering (ABEN) at North Dakota State University (NDSU). Dr. Flores holds a PhD degree in Soil Science from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil, 2008). He has a 40/60 Teaching/Research appointment. Since joining the ABEN department in 2019, Dr. Flores has developed and though three new courses in the area of precision agriculture (PAG 454 - Applications of Precision Agriculture, PAG 455 - Big Data Applications in Precision Agriculture, and PAG 475 – Precision Ag Systems – capstone course). In other activities related to teaching, Dr. Flores advises graduate and undergraduate students, and often serves as a mentor/collaborator in capstone projects in the NDSU Computer Science program. Dr. Flores has over 10 years of experience working with GIS software, and since 2015 he has been applying some of that knowledge toward unmanned aerial systems (UASs) imagery analysis with the goal to extract useful information from those. One of his main research interests is the use of sensors mounted to UASs and other platforms for high throughput phenotyping (HTP), with special focus on developing solutions (algorithms/scripts) to streamline the data analysis for field research plots. Dr. Flores’s research group has collaborated with plant breeders at NDSU to developed HTP approaches for greenhouse and lab environments as well, involving hardware and software solutions. Another research topic of his interest is the integration of UAS imagery and commercial sprayers to implement site specific weed control approaches, currently focusing on corn. One of Dr. Flores latest research topics of interest is the integration of UAS imagery and soil sensors (portable and networks) data to better understand variability across fields that is captured by sensors mounted to UASs.  

After earning her Ph.D. from Northwest A&F University (China) and Texas A&M (USA) in 2015, Dr. Yuanjie Wang joined the Agricultural Information Institute of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, which is located in Beijing, China. Dr. Wang started her career as an Assistant Professor in 2016 and then was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019. Dr. Wang leads several research programs, mainly in the areas of smart agriculture technology and intelligent agricultural machines. She is the scientific editor of Smart Agriculture Journal and International Journal of Agricultural and Biological Engineering.