The application of the Internet of Things in agricultural development usually occurs via a monitoring network that consists of a large number of sensor nodes, thus gradually transforming agriculture from a human-oriented and single-machine-centric production model to an information-and software-centric production model. Due to the large area coverage of agriculture and the variety of production objects, if all farmland perception information is gathered into the cloud server, the server will exert greater pressure on the network, which reduces the speed of response to event processing. This problem may be perfectly solved by the recent emergence of Edge computing, which can share the load of the cloud server and reduce the delay. Edge computing has prospects in agricultural applications, such as pest identification, safety traceability of agricultural products, unmanned agricultural machinery, agricultural technology promotion, and intelligent management. The application of the Agricultural Internet of Things integrates artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and blockchain and Virtual/Augmented Reality technologies. This paper primarily reviews the application of Edge computing in the Agricultural Internet of Things and investigates the combination of Edge computing and Artificial Intelligence, blockchain and Virtual/Augmented reality technology. The challenges of Edge computing task allocation, data processing, privacy protection and security, and service stability in agriculture are reviewed. The future development direction of Edge computing in the Agricultural Internet of Things is predicted.

In recent years, the crop protection unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been raised great attention around the world due to the advantages of more efficient operation and lower requirement of special landing airport. However, there are few researches on obstacle-avoiding path planning for crop protection UAV. In this study, an improved Dubins curve algorithm was proposed for path planning with multiple obstacle constraints. First, according to the flight parameters of UAV and the types of obstacles in the field, the obstacle circle model and the small obstacle model were established. Second, after selecting the appropriate Dubins curve to generate the obstacle-avoiding path for multiple obstacles, the genetic algorithm (GA) was used to search the optimal obstacle-avoiding path. Third, for turning in the path planning, a strategy considering the size of the spray width and the UAV's minimum turning radius was presented, which could decrease the speed change times. The results showed that the proposed algorithm can decrease the area of overlap and skip to 205.1%, while the path length increased by only 1.6% in comparison with the traditional Dubins obstacle-avoiding algorithm under the same conditions. With the increase of obstacle radius, the area of overlap and skip reduced effectively with no significant increase in path length. Therefore, the algorithm can efficiently improve the validity of path planning with multiple obstacle constraints and ensure the safety of flight.

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