Greenhouse cultivation has evolved from simple covered rows of open-fields crops to highly sophisticated controlled environment agriculture (CEA) facilities that projected the image of plant factories for urban agriculture. The advances and improvements in CEA have promoted the scientific solutions for the efficient production of plants in populated cities and multi-story buildings. Successful deployment of CEA for urban agriculture requires many components and subsystems, as well as the understanding of the external influencing factors that should be systematically considered and integrated. This review is an attempt to highlight some of the most recent advances in greenhouse technology and CEA in order to raise the awareness for technology transfer and adaptation, which is necessary for a successful transition to urban agriculture. This study reviewed several aspects of a high-tech CEA system including improvements in the frame and covering materials, environment perception and data sharing, and advanced microclimate control and energy optimization models. This research highlighted urban agriculture and its derivatives, including vertical farming, rooftop greenhouses and plant factories which are the extensions of CEA and have emerged as a response to the growing population, environmental degradation, and urbanization that are threatening food security. Finally, several opportunities and challenges have been identified in implementing the integrated CEA and vertical farming for urban agriculture.

Digital farming is the practice of modern technologies such as sensors, robotics, and data analysis for shifting from tedious operations to continuously automated processes. This paper reviews some of the latest achievements in agricultural robotics, specifically those that are used for autonomous weed control, field scouting, and harvesting. Object identification, task planning algorithms, digitalization and optimization of sensors are highlighted as some of the facing challenges in the context of digital farming. The concepts of multi-robots, human-robot collaboration, and environment reconstruction from aerial images and ground-based sensors for the creation of virtual farms were highlighted as some of the gateways of digital farming. It was shown that one of the trends and research focuses in agricultural field robotics is towards building a swarm of small scale robots and drones that collaborate together to optimize farming inputs and reveal denied or concealed information. For the case of robotic harvesting, an autonomous framework with several simple axis manipulators can be faster and more efficient than the currently adapted professional expensive manipulators. While robots are becoming the inseparable parts of the modern farms, our conclusion is that it is not realistic to expect an entirely automated farming system in the future.

Greenhouse technology is a flexible solution for sustainable year-round cultivation of Tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill), particularly in regions with adverse climate conditions or limited land and resources. Accurate knowledge about plant requirements at different growth stages, and under various light conditions, can contribute to the design of adaptive control strategies for a more cost-effective and competitive production. In this context, different scientific publications have recommended different values of microclimate parameters at different tomato growth stages. This paper provides a detailed summary of optimal, marginal and failure air and root-zone temperatures, relative humidity and vapour pressure deficit for successful greenhouse cultivation of tomato. Graphical representations of the membership function model to define the optimality degrees of these three parameters are included with a view to determining how close the greenhouse microclimate is to the optimal condition. Several production constraints have also been discussed to highlight the short and long-term effects of adverse microclimate conditions on the quality and yield of tomato, which are associated with interactions between suboptimal parameters, greenhouse environment and growth responses.

Microsatellites, or simple sequence repeats (SSRs), are one of the most informative and multi-purpose genetic markers exploited in plant functional genomics. However, the discovery of SSRs and development using traditional methods are laborious, time-consuming, and costly. Recently, the availability of high-throughput sequencing technologies has enabled researchers to identify a substantial number of microsatellites at less cost and effort than traditional approaches. Illumina is a noteworthy transcriptome sequencing technology that is currently used in SSR marker development. Although 454 pyrosequencing datasets can be used for SSR development, this type of sequencing is no longer supported. This review aims to present an overview of the next generation sequencing, with a focus on the efficient use of de novo transcriptome sequencing (RNA-Seq) and related tools for mining and development of microsatellites in plants.

Digital farming is the practice of modern technologies such as sensors, robotics, and data analysis for shifting from tedious operations to continuously automated processes. This paper reviews some of the latest achievements in agricultural robotics, specifically those that are used for autonomous weed control, field scouting, and harvesting. Object identification, task planning algorithms, digitalization and optimization of sensors are highlighted as some of the facing challenges in the context of digital farming. The concepts of multi-robots, human-robot collaboration, and environment reconstruction from aerial images and ground-based sensors for the creation of virtual farms were highlighted as some of the gateways of digital farming. It was shown that one of the trends and research focuses in agricultural field robotics is towards building a swarm of small scale robots and drones that collaborate together to optimize farming inputs and reveal denied or concealed information. For the case of robotic harvesting, an autonomous framework with several simple axis manipulators can be faster and more efficient than the currently adapted professional expensive manipulators. While robots are becoming the inseparable parts of the modern farms, our conclusion is that it is not realistic to expect an entirely automated farming system in the future.