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The decade of the 1970s will go down in the history of marketing as the period when strategic marketing planning first emerged as an identifiable area of theory and practice. In the process, a whole new vocabulary of terms was added to the marketing lexicon. Thus, one now speaks of cash cows, stars, problem children, and dogs when one refers to products and product portfolios. To deal with products classified in this manner, a set of four general market‐share‐based strategies has been formulated: building; holding; harvesting; and withdrawal.

In this article, the author discusses dynamical behaviors of a prey-predator population model with nonlinear harvesting rate and offers a mathematical analysis of the model.

The design is by using modelization of populations interaction, qualitative theory of ordinary différential equations, bifurcations analysis, invariant center manifolds theory and Dulac's criterion.

The author studies the stability of solutions and the existence of periodic solutions in the model, and proves the existence of some invariant sets and the production of a transcritical together with a saddle-node bifurcation.

The author studies the effects of harvesting on the persistence and extinction properties and its influence in the perspectives of economic views.

The authors considers a predator–prey model with a new nonlinear form of harvesting rate. The author’s intention is to make conceptual adjustments to a well-known predator–prey model in order to incorporate the effects of harvesting.

This paper aims to investigate if a Cartesian robot system for kiwifruit harvesting works more effectively and efficiently than an articulated robot system. The robot is a key component in agricultural automation. For instance, multiple robot arm system has been developed for kiwifruit harvesting recently because of the significant labor shortage issue. The industrial robots for factory automation usually have articulated configuration which is suitable for the tasks in the manufacturing and production environment. However, this articulated configuration may not fit for agricultural application due to the large outdoor environment.

The kiwifruit harvesting tasks are completed step by step so that the robot workspace covers the canopy completely. A two-arm, Cartesian kiwifruit harvesting robot system and several field experiments are developed for the investigation. The harvest cycle time of the Cartesian robot system is compared to that of an articulated robot system. The difference is analyzed based on the workspace geometries of these two robot configurations.

It is found that the kiwifruit harvesting productivity is increased by using a multiple robot system with Cartesian configuration owing to its regular workspace geometry.

An articulated robot is a common configuration for manufacturing because of its simple structure and the relatively static factory environment. Most of the agricultural robotics research studies use single articulated robot for their implementation. This paper pinpoints how the workspace of a multiple robot system affects the harvest cycle time for kiwifruit harvesting in a pergola style kiwifruit orchard.

The authors construct an intertemporal model of rent-maximizing behavior on the part of a timber harvester under potentially multidimensional risk as well as geographical heterogeneity. Subsequently, the authors use recursive methods (specifically, the method of stochastic dynamic programing) to characterize the optimal policy function – the rent-maximizing timber-harvesting profile. One noteworthy feature of their application to forestry in the province of British Columbia, Canada is the unique and detailed information the authors have organized in the form of a dynamic geographic information system to account for site-specific cost heterogeneity in harvesting and transportation, as well as uneven-aged stand dynamics in timber growth and yield across space and time in the presence of stochastic lumber prices. Their framework is a powerful tool with which to conduct policy analysis at scale.

The scope of this chapter is to present the key issues of taking the exit route from a business venture. Its aim is therefore to analyse the main strategies and suitable methods to harvest a business venture, as well as to outline the appropriate plan and the main aspects of valuation.

Literature review was conducted on issues and aspects that are related to harvesting of a business. These issues have been illustrated with an example and case studies.

This chapter highlights the fact that every mindful entrepreneur will normally have a roadmap and a plan to exit from a business venture. It provides entrepreneurs with guidance to elaborate suitable strategies and adopt appropriate methods to exit a business.

This chapter is explorative in nature, based on a literature review.

Entrepreneurs often find themselves consumed in making a business successful, while they neglect to elaborate a plan for harvesting a business venture. This chapter provides entrepreneurs with the needed guidance on how to exit a business by preparing an effective plan, in case it is not successful or for personal reasons. It also presents a set of practical advices on decision-making about related strategies and methods.

The chapter analyses, in a comprehensive and practical way, the reasons, methods and strategies of harvesting, as well as the elements of an effective plan to take the exit route.

This paper's main objective is to focus on the water-harvesting ability of plants and try to implement a solution-based method to outline a plant-inspired design framework.

The current paper aims to provide a step-by-step approach to the biological-inspired design by looking deeply at plants' mechanisms and features to harvest water and conduct a method to learn them in an organized way.

In addition to the proposed framework, the fundamental water-harvesting principles of plants including increasing condensation, reducing transpiration and facilitating transportation have been extracted by investigating several adaptable plants. The relevant factors related to each of these three principles are introduced and can potentially ease the process of bio-inspiration as it contributes to the findability and understandability of a particular biologic strategy. As a result, this framework can be used to the formation of novel designs in different disciplines. In this process, the development of an architectural design concept is presented as an example.

The current global issue about the shortage of water leads researchers to learn adaptability from nature and increase the demands of using bio-inspired strategies. The novelty of this study is to introduce a water-harvesting design path, which has been presented using a four-step-plant-to-design process. Learning from plants' water-harvesting strategies will contribute to efficiency in different disciplines. The findings of this study have important implications for developing bio-inspired water-harvesting materials and systems. Moreover, the findings add substantially to the understanding of water-harvesting architecture and play an important role in bridging the gap between theory and practice.

A harvesting robot is developed as part of kiwifruit industry automation in New Zealand. This kiwifruit harvester is currently not economically viable, as it drops and damages too many kiwifruit in the harvesting task due to the positional inaccuracy of the gripper. This is due to the difficulties in measuring the exact effective dimensions of the gripper from the manipulator. The purpose of this study is to obtain the effective gripper dimensions using kinematic calibration procedures.

A setup of a constraint plate with a dial gauge is proposed to acquire the calibration data. The constraint plate is positioned above the robot. The data is obtained by using a dial gauge and a permanent marker. The effective dimensions of the gripper are used as error parameters in the calibration process. Calibration is exercised by minimizing the difference between target positions and measured positions iteratively.

The robot with the obtained effective dimensions is tested in the field. It is found that the fruit drops due to positional inaccuracy of the gripper are greatly reduced after calibration.

The kiwifruit industry in New Zealand is growing rapidly and announced plans in 2017 to double global sales by 2025. This growth will put extra pressure on the labour supply for harvesting. Furthermore, the Covid pandemic and resulting border restrictions have dramatically reduced seasonal imported labour availability. A robotic system is a potential solution to address the labour shortages for harvesting kiwifruit.

For kiwifruit harvesting, the picking envelope is well above the robot; the experimental data points obtained by placing a constraint plate above the robot are at similar positions to the target positions of kiwifruit. Using this set of data points for calibration yields a good effect of obtaining the effective dimension of the gripper, which reduces the positional inaccuracy as shown in the field test results.

This paper aims to introduce the term, knowledge harvesting, as an aid for researchers in comprehending what knowledge strategies influences projects, where to find knowledge, how to visualize knowledge, how to cultivate knowledge, who distributes project knowledge and how to gain former project knowledge.

The term knowledge harvesting emerged after having analyzed employees interviews at a Danish welding machine manufacturer using an adjusted grounded theory.

Employees’ knowledge harvesting strategies involve collecting knowledge, making knowledge visible in projects, introducing knowledge in projects, identifying knowledge deficiencies, cultivating knowledge to support projects and ensuring readily available historical knowledge termed para-knowledge.

To strengthen how significant and relevant knowledge harvesting can be, researchers need to apply knowledge harvesting as an explanation in their own research projects. Only then will knowledge harvesting becomes a solid explanation of what knowledge strategies employees apply and their implications for organization learning.

Knowledge harvesting introduces new understandings regarding employees’ knowledge acquisition processes during product development. Knowledge harvesting can help researchers to understand and identify how, why and what knowledge processes take place throughout product development.

Time of flight (ToF) imaging is a promising emerging technology for the purposes of crop identification. This paper aim to presents localization system for identifying and localizing asparagus in the field based on point clouds from ToF imaging. Since the semantics are not included in the point cloud, it contains the geometric information of other objects such as stones and weeds other than asparagus spears. An approach is required for extracting the spear information so that a robotic system can be used for harvesting.

A real-time convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method is used for filtering the point cloud generated by a ToF camera, allowing subsequent processing methods to operate over smaller and more information-dense data sets, resulting in reduced processing time. The segmented point cloud can then be split into clusters of points representing each individual spear. Geometric filters are developed to eliminate the non-asparagus points in each cluster so that each spear can be modelled and localized. The spear information can then be used for harvesting decisions.

The localization system is integrated into a robotic harvesting prototype system. Several field trials have been conducted with satisfactory performance. The identification of a spear from the point cloud is the key to successful localization. Segmentation and clustering points into individual spears are two major failures for future improvements.

Most crop localizations in agricultural robotic applications using ToF imaging technology are implemented in a very controlled environment, such as a greenhouse. The target crop and the robotic system are stationary during the localization process. The novel proposed method for asparagus localization has been tested in outdoor farms and integrated with a robotic harvesting platform. Asparagus detection and localization are achieved in real time on a continuously moving robotic platform in a cluttered and unstructured environment.

This paper aims to provide details of recent energy harvesting developments.

Following an introduction, this paper first considers mechanical and biomechanical energy harvesting developments. It then discusses hybrid harvesting technologies and self-powered sensors and concludes with a brief discussion.

Energy harvesting is the topic of a major research effort and growing commercial activities. Several advanced technologies are being used to develop sophisticated devices to harvest individual or combined energy sources. These developments are expected to play a central role in many emerging sensor markets.

This paper provides technical details of a selection of recently reported energy harvesting developments.