Assessment of Smart Mechatronics Applications in Agriculture: A Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors:

1)    In my opinion, the background is not well organized. It would be better if the authors first explain the motivation for their study and finally then discuss the problem statement.

2)    Make the exposition tight and clear (right now, it is meandering and redundant, particularly in the first part of the paper).

3)   The research objectives and methodology should be better explained and motivated.

4)    The objectives must be clearly indicated in the abstract.

5)    In the conclusions section, the authors should provide a general interpretation of the rustles, the unique contributions of the paper, and the limitations of the research's managerial implications.

6)    The authors must add updated articles 3 to 5 references from the "Applied Science".

7) The word we appear in the paper 22 times, it is advisable to reduce the use of this word- we. I suggest you use the passive rather than the first person. I.e. instead of we did you should write it was done.

8)    Figure 1- Total wheat production in the top ten countries in 2021. Is it possible to display more updated data?

9)    Lines: 333-335 - "Finally we evaluated 88 different publications of contemporary literature in order to carry out the current task, and based on the previous research we came to a conclusion". This sentence is not clear.

10) I think that lines 336-342 are unnecessary and do not need to be presented in the paper.

11) Lines 381-385 need to be edited.

12) Check Equation 1 (line 458).  (Isn't it squared? – Sum Squared Error (SSE)).

13) Line 463 - MSbetween data base group should be changed to   MS between database group.  

14)  Line 463 Where F statistics …. should be changed to   Where F (italic) statistics 

15) Line 466 – "For this work all the Pvalue are greater than the 0.05 alpha value", greater or smaller? (See table 3).

16) Line 502 – "In addition, prior research on monitoring in agriculture has been divided into studies on soil, animals, which the previous study?

I do hope you find these comments and questions helpful in improving the manuscript.

Author Response

We appreciate the suggestion, thanks for your great time again

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article is devoted to the review and analysis of literary publications related to the use of smart mechatronic systems in agriculture. The subject of the article is of practical interest, but there are a number of shortcomings that need to be eliminated in order to be able to publish it later.

1) In the review of the literature on the text of the article, it is necessary to indicate the author and preferably the year, for example: The operation of the milking machine is described in the article by A. Augustin et al. (2016) [46], W.-S. Kim et al. (2020) [47].

2) The article mainly provides an analysis of publications in various journals and publishing houses, but there are no technical details - methods, tools, sensors, software, neural networks, etc.

3) Write examples of autonomous tractors and robots with GPS support, what software is used, what controllers and principle of operation, provide photos of such machines for various applications

4) Give examples (from the use of such drones, what is the result (give an example of a picture), what methods are used to process data, what software is used

5) Give what technical devices (sensors, actuators, controllers) are used on dairy farms, give a picture.

6) Describe the SMARTBOW system in more detail. What is the practical result (decrease in diseases, increase in livestock, etc.), by what percentage?

7) Give examples of sensors, controllers, poultry automation software. What is the economic effect of the introduction of smart poultry farms?

8) Write examples of IoT sensor types in greenhouses - humidity, temperature, light, soil moisture, concentration and pH, photovoltaic thermal energy. What robots are used in greenhouses, for what operations? Bring pictures, screenshots of SCADAsystems. What is the economic effect of using mechatronic systems in greenhouses?

9) Similarly, describe in more detail with illustrations other subsections of your article related to the use of mechatronic systems - smart farm, irrigation, warehouse, etc.

10) What artificial intelligence methods are used in modern mechatronic systems? Mathematical apparatus, decision-making methods, optimization methods, etc.

11) The methodology should be improved by adding mindmaps/graphs and further clarifications. Need a research outline at the beginning of your article

12) Also highlight the purpose of the study and the points of the research task. At the end, the conclusions should correspond to these tasks.

13) Move the current section with conclusions to the "discussion" section

Author Response

We appreciate the suggestion, thanks for your great time again

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

·       The novelty of the paper needs to be justified in the Introduction section.

·       Line 12: ‘………. made in smart ……….’. Correct it.

·       The title of Table 1 needs to be corrected. It only shows mean and variance among different groups.

·       Correct Eq, 1. What does the difference in ‘y_i’ and ‘y_mean’ equals to?

·       Table 3: Why F values are not reported. Kindly report them in this table.

·       Figure 3: The percentage contribution of mechatronics and agriculture by different countries mentioned in the text are different than shown in Figure 3. Kindly check and correct. For example, Chine seems to be 35%, however, in the text it is mentioned as 28%.

·       In sections ‘Drone supported farming’ and ‘Smart farm irrigation’: Following study may be added to strengthen the manuscript: Kumar, N., Upadhyay, G., Choudhary, S., Patel, B., Chhokar, R. S., & Gill, S. C. (2023). Resource conserving mechanization technologies for dryland agriculture. In Enhancing Resilience of Dryland Agriculture Under Changing Climate: Interdisciplinary and Convergence Approaches (pp. 657-688). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.

·       The font of the text is different at many places in the manuscript and needs to be corrected.

·       Table 1: Report data only up to two decimal places.

·       In section ‘Autonomous farm machinery’ Following study may be added to strengthen the manuscript: Nataraj, E., Sarkar, P., Raheman, H., & Upadhyay, G. (2021). Embedded digital display and warning system of velocity ratio and wheel slip for tractor operated active tillage implements. Journal of Terramechanics, 97, 35-43.

·       In the Conclusions section it is better to write author’s recommendations in bullet form.

Author Response

We appreciate the suggestion. thanks for your great time again

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

This paper wanted to review smart agriculture techniques. I have found the following issues in the paper.

27% similarity found in ithenticate.

Moderate editing is needed to make the paper more understandable.

"as explained by [14-16]", "accordingly [17-19]" , "According to [23-25]" .. using this type of referencing is discouraged. 

The introduction needs to be improved. Authors talk about food and farming and then suddenly they talk about underfeeding. I think this underfeeding discussion can come earlier than food and farming and mechanization of farming. 

Moreover, the introduction section is too long. It also lacks proper justification for the problem. My suggestion is that the introduction should formulate the problem with a minimal number of references. Then another section for literature review or preliminaries or background can be introduced which will have the classification of precision agriculture and mechanization with detailed references.

In the methods section, the authors talk about how they prepare the data in excel. But that is not the main point. It is not very important whether you added buttons in your datasheets. It is important what insight a particular method is providing you. 

The font in the results and discussion section is different in the first paragraph. This must be fixed.

The authors showed figure 3 and discussed the contribution of mechatronics and agriculture by countries. However, they did not discuss how these countries used mechatronics and not critical review has been presented.

Moreover, I do not think that discussion on differences among the publisher groups' are necessary. Similarly, showing and discussing the results of year wise different agricultural sectors is also not necessary.

Overall, the authors wanted to review the applications of mechatronics to agriculture.  However, they failed to critically analyse different smart techniques which are in use for agriculture. Therefore, I reject this paper to be published.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

The English of the paper is not very sound. many sentences have grammatical mistakes. There are some unclear sentences. I have marked some problems in the pdf file.

Author Response

thanks for your  great time  again

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

In the second version, the authors improved the articlesomewhat, but most of our questions remainedunanswered.

 

Most of the responses came down to the phrase "There isno need to describe this", or "Thanks for the suggestion.Was explained in the text". Authors are requested toindicate the lines of the article that contain the answer toour question, or duplicate this answer in the table. 

 

We also consider it necessary to briefly describe thehardware and software used for automation, robotization ofagricultural production, to specify the intelligenttechnologies that are used.

 

Also, in review articles, when citing, it is customary toindicate in the text of the article the authors (at least one) who were involved in this study, which is a sign of respectfor the researchers.

 

We also consider it necessary to provide some figures toillustrate the result of the work of intelligent systems inagriculture. This will be better perceived by the reader.

 

I would also like to see a structural diagram of research, forexample, in the form of mind maps. What is the input andoutput of research?

 

We will comment on some of the answers in more detail.

 

1) «Thanks for the suggestion.

We go through journal template, and use zoetro citationmanagement of IEEE forms. So it’s generatedautomatically by software.»

This is not about the list of references, but about mentioning theauthors in the text of the article. You have a review article, and itis customary to mention the name of at least one author, and notjust the source number.

2) «We appreciate the suggestion.

We talked about integrating those tools into smartmechatronics. Because smart mechatronics now lacks thoseinstruments, they are ineffective, which is why we plan toadvocate for their incorporation into the agriculturesectors»

 

It was about the need to describe various technical solutionsused for automation and robotization of agriculture. This is notdone in the second version of the article

3) «The text provides details. However, providingphotographs of such equipment for various purposes isnot actually necessary.»

 

4) «I appreciate the suggestion. The text explains this.

However, it is not really required to supply images of suchmachines for different purposes. The absence of intelligentsystems remains a drawback. We were not informed of thetype of software used. We noted some drawbacks and madesuggestions for future research»

 

The authors use the words "smart agriculture", "intelligentsolutions" many times, but no specifics have been written. Specify which technologies are used in various agriculturaltechnological processes. Expert systems, neural networks, etc.

Author Response

Thanks for your great time

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Kindly follow a standard References style as per journal guidelines. Here is the link. https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/instructions#preparation 

Author Response

Thanks for your great time

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The abstract has 2 paragraphs which is not recommended for an abstract.

The authors referred to Figure 1 in line 121 but I am not sure how the chart of top wheat-producing countries can be related to mechanized agriculture. They failed to link the figure with the description.

I am not sure how relevant Figure 3 (i.e. the country-wise contribution of research papers) is. Why do we have to know which country published how many papers. Rather, we need to know which country adopted what techniques and why and how and what advantages and/or disadvantages the techniques provide to that country.

I agree with Figure 4 and the discussion. But the need of showing publisher wise article numbers and the discussion on that is not at all necessary in my opinion. It does not provide any insight into the techniques. Why should we look at the publisher rather than the methods?

In line 500, the authors mentioned that "However, some components not recommended for smart mechatronics applications are frequently used in modern agriculture technology". What components are not recommended and why? The authors failed to explain that.

Author Response

Thanks for your great time

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf