**Preface to "Robots and Autonomous Machines for Agriculture Production"**

Global agriculture faces critical pressures, including an aging population, rising production costs, and labor shortages. An important alternative solution for these challenges, robots and autonomous machines represent a high-level application of smart agriculture, which is based on a precise and resource-efficient approach to sustainably achieving higher efficiency and quality in agricultural production. On the one hand, robotics and autonomous machines continue to spread into various new agricultural scenarios, and on the other hand, technologies such as deep learning and machine learning are increasingly being used in agricultural production. By exploring the diverse methodologies employed in addressing such challenges, this Special Issue aims to advance the field and improve the efficiency of agricultural production through robotic and autonomous innovations.

In order to investigate the advancements in robots and autonomous systems for agriculture, by using modeling, detection, and control technologies and emphasizing their potential in precision farming, crop protection, crop harvesting, etc., we have organized this Special Issue, "Robots and Autonomous Machines for Agriculture Production". The issue has a total of 26 papers which cover a wide range of agricultural operations, including cotton planters, maize planters, apple harvesting, shrimp peeling, rice phenotyping, pest control, bale collection, pineapple processing, garlic seeding, agricultural film collecting, lettuce growth modelling, egg microcrack detection, forage pushing, fungus harvesting, and jujube pruning. In terms of the research field, the issue focuses on robotics and its related application research, such as the following areas: soft gripper design, autonomous robots, humanoid field-phenotyping robots, apple detection, manipulator motion planning, dairy robots, vineyard spraying robots, fungus harvesting robots, and orchard visual navigation. In addition, it also focuses on intelligent agricultural machines in different scenarios of seeding, crop monitoring, agricultural products, etc.

In summary, this Special Issue highlights different approaches in the development of agricultural robots and intelligent agricultural machines in several agricultural application scenarios for scene and object perception, intelligent decision support methods, and operational mechanisms and their control. It is expected that the insights gained from this Special Issue will be useful to researchers in the field of agricultural robots and autonomous machines.

> **Jin Yuan, Wei Ji, and Qingchun Feng** *Editors*
