Smart farming machinery is playing an essential role in transforming agriculture in China by boosting efficiency and productivity, with technologies helping farmers reduce costs and increase yields, benefiting both individual farms and the overall agricultural sector.
In Qingyuan City of south China's Guangdong Province, smart agricultural drones with AI vision models are helping local farmers manage the rice fields. These drones can intelligently identify crop status, pests, and diseases, helping to guide irrigation, pest control, and other agricultural activities.
In north Beijing's suburban Changping District, driverless tractors are used for corn planting in a high-tech smart farm. This year, the equipment has been upgraded for automatic seeding.
"During the seeding process, the control system must work in joint debugging and adaptation with the seeding machine. A series of sensors on the seeding machine indicate when the vehicle should begin seeding," said Sun Xiangming, head of the smart farm.
In Kunshan City of east China's Jiangsu Province, an AI monitoring system has been used in a smart farm for intelligent oversight of irrigation and drainage channels. By designing models and positioning in advance, all facilities are under control with the help of the smart management system.
As smart technologies are applied in various scenarios, the operation of smart machinery in farming is becoming increasingly technological.
In a smart factory producing tractors in Weifang City of east China's Shandong Province, the orders are assigned to robots through the factory's smart system. The factory produces over 270 tractors of more than 100 horsepower per day. With nearly 500 robots working in coordination with human workers, the factory has achieved a 93 percent automation rate in machining, doubling its production efficiency.
Smart farming machinery boosts efficiency in agricultural production across China
Honor's humanoid robot, Lightning, which swept the 2026 Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon on Sunday, is a natural extension of years of accumulation in consumer electronics technology, said its developers.
A leading smart device provider in China, Honor independently developed the model, which dominated the podium at the event as it was used by all three teams whose autonomous navigating robots ran the fastest times.
At the Honor factory in Pingshan District in Shenzhen City, south China's Guangdong Province, where robotics engineers developed Lightning. They said the robot's body design incorporates a simulation system that, through artificial intelligence algorithms, can iterate nearly 30,000 design schemes of varying sizes over three months. Complete and mature systems are also in place for battery, communication, and reliability verification.
"We built a simulation lab from scratch. For the robots, we digitize the entire design and put it into a computer. We have our own material library, which can meet the force, thermal, and chemical property demands for each component, under different environments and speeds. We've accumulated about 1000 kinds of materials. For example, if there's a risk with the robot's neck, we just need to change the material code from 001 to 002. Now, through our simulations, we only need one day to perform parallel calculations on 10 different designs, before creating a mold and verifying it in the lab," said Li Zheng, a senior engineer at Honor.
An autonomous robot capable of completing a half-marathon involves a complete industry chain, with core components including high-precision sensors, LiDAR, motors, operating systems, and control algorithms. The development of robotic marathoners have driven an increasing number of component enterprises to get involved.
Manifold, a tech firm established by newly-graduated PhDs, has developed a 3D spatial memory module, which can model an environment in real time and transform it into images that robots can understand. They said several robots running the half-marathon this year adopted their solution.
"Our device can operate within a one-kilometer tunnel with an error margin of only tens of centimeters. For robots, especially in the absence of GPS, this allows them to accurately determine their location. The underlying technology is a multi-sensor fusion technology that we developed in-house," said Qin Youming, CEO and founder of Manifold.
The Beijing Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center set up a training camp for the marathon event. Many university students came a month ahead of the event to develop and debug their technologies and algorithms based on open-source robot bodies, databases, and training platforms.
"These high-quality databases and highly open-source control algorithms are actually very helpful to us. We no longer need to build the house from the ground up, but can skip the most basic part," said Sun Jingyu, a student from Shandong University.
"Through this racing event, I believe we can make our robots more reliable and stable, while also supporting high-dynamic, high-load movements. This is crucial for robots' future application in both industrial, commercial and domestic scenarios," said Guo Yijie, head of the innovative humanoid department and the Marathon project of Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center.
Engineers share development story behind Beijing humanoid half-marathon champion model
