Shanxi Province has launched a campaign to select and recommend typical robot application scenarios in agriculture, aiming to drive innovation in agricultural machinery through benchmark cases and advance the province's agricultural mechanization, intelligence, and high-quality development of the agricultural machinery industry. The initiative is jointly led by the Shanxi Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology and the Shanxi Provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
The selection targets three key areas: crop cultivation, animal husbandry, and primary processing of agricultural products. It focuses on critical stages such as seedling breeding, soil preparation, sowing, field management, harvesting, livestock feeding, breeding, product collection, and initial processing and storage. The goal is to identify and promote robot scenarios that are technologically advanced, mature, produce clear results, have broad application prospects, and can be replicated and scaled up.
In the cultivation sector, scenarios are being sought for monitoring crop conditions, precision soil preparation, nursery inspection, pollination and grafting, precision seeding and transplanting, pesticide application and weeding, and fruit and vegetable picking and harvesting. These address challenges like diverse crops, complex planting conditions, high precision requirements, difficult all-weather management, and labor intensity.
In the husbandry sector, scenarios include inspecting livestock, precise feeding, behavior monitoring, vaccine injection, cleaning and disinfection, milking, and aquatic animal catching. This targets issues such as complex animal behavior, harsh production environments, and difficult disease prevention.
In the primary processing sector, scenarios are sought for intelligent slaughtering, unmanned lifting, inspection and grading, handling and palletizing, and warehouse management. These address the diversity of agricultural products, varying material properties, and high grading requirements.
The selection process evaluates scenarios based on three dimensions: technological advancement, scenario maturity, and potential for replication and promotion. Requirements include that the robot products have clear core intellectual property without disputes, that the application scenarios are clearly defined and do not involve state secrets or commercial secrets, and that the robots comply with national safety standards, with functional safety and human-machine collaboration safety designs suitable for the scenarios. Their operation must also adhere to laws on agricultural input management and environmental protection.