As soon as the agricultural machinery sounds, there is no panic in farming. The application of intelligent machinery and equipment has changed the previous production mode facing the loess and facing the sky, liberating farmers' hands from heavy agricultural work and effectively promoting the rapid development of the agricultural industry. However, the complexity and changeability of vegetable production have brought great challenges to the application of intelligent and unmanned production. On May 16, the 2024 China Vegetable Industry Conference opened in Hexian County, Anhui Province. Zhao Chunjiang, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and director of the National Engineering Research Center for Agricultural Informatization, made a report on "Exploration and Research of Unmanned Farms", telling about the present and future of unmanned operations in the agricultural field.
Zhao Chunjiang, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and director of the National Engineering Research Center for Agricultural Informatization
01
Vegetable production urgently needs to be injected with the power of science and technology
"In the context of rapid urbanization, serious shortage of rural labor, and gradually increasing labor costs, it is particularly important to let machines replace manpower in production." Zhao Chunjiang, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and director of the National Agricultural Information Engineering Technology Research Center, pointed out that vegetables, as the second largest crop in the mainland, have been significantly improved in terms of yield and planting area, and now the key factor limiting the development of the vegetable industry in the mainland is the high labor cost. Taking radish as an example, the average labor cost per person per mu of field is as high as 1300~1500 yuan, which brings heavy pressure to vegetable production.
On the one hand, the vegetable industry connects the "vegetable basket" and "fruit plate" of the city, and on the other hand, it connects the "money bags" of vegetable farmers and vegetable merchants, and its industrial development plays an important role in optimizing the agricultural industrial chain in various places. In recent years, with the continuous breakthrough of the "stuck neck" technology, agricultural machinery and equipment that can be used for vegetable production have sprung up rapidly, solving the urgent need for vegetable production. However, at present, the level of digitalization and mechanization of vegetable production in mainland China is still low, and the mechanization rate of facility horticulture is only 42%, while the mechanization utilization rate of field production is only 73%. In this regard, Zhao Chunjiang said that agricultural machinery and equipment still need to be further improved, and through intelligent and digital transformation and upgrading, it will bring greater convenience to farmers' production and application.
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Intelligent production is full of vitality
From "freeing your hands" to "knowing the sky", the new generation of artificial intelligence is profoundly changing the way of scientific and technological innovation, production, sales and management organization of agriculture, and is an important means to promote the creation of new agricultural productivity and high-quality and sustainable development. "The realization of unmanned and less man-made production of vegetables is inseparable from the support of artificial intelligence." Zhao Chunjiang pointed out that agriculture is a complex system, although scientists have made a lot of research and efforts in the field of agricultural production, and have realized the mechanization of agricultural production, but agricultural production still needs to rely on experience to a large extent to manage, and many scenarios are difficult to express in detail with digital models. With the advent of artificial intelligence, this dilemma has been effectively solved. According to Zhao Chunjiang, now the new generation of artificial intelligence can effectively realize the dynamic management of data and knowledge, so that intelligent agricultural machinery equipment in the application of agricultural unmanned operations shows great vitality.
With the continuous integration and development of the three major elements of modern agricultural productivity, biotechnology, information technology and intelligent equipment, an advanced agricultural productivity - smart agriculture has gradually formed in recent years. Smart agriculture emphasizes an intelligent decision-making system, coupled with a variety of hardware facilities and equipment. Smart agriculture relies on various sensing nodes and wireless communication networks deployed in agricultural production sites to realize intelligent perception, intelligent early warning, intelligent decision-making, and intelligent analysis of the agricultural production environment, and provides precision planting, visual management, and intelligent decision-making for agricultural production.
In Zhao Chunjiang's view, smart agriculture has typical characteristics of new quality productivity. (1) Smart agriculture has advanced production tools, such as intelligent equipment and robots, which can have a certain subversive effect on traditional agricultural production. (2) Smart agriculture also exhibits the characteristics of high quality, high efficiency and high efficiency, and can provide more convenient, fast and humanized services for agricultural production. The development and application of smart agriculture can replace manpower with intelligent machines to complete many complex and heavy agricultural labor, reduce the labor burden of farmers, producers and operators, and improve the quality and efficiency of agricultural development.
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Unmanned operation breaks through the dilemma
"The intelligence and digitalization of agricultural production worldwide is the general trend, but the current intelligent level of agriculture in the mainland is still relatively weak, and it is still difficult to achieve unmanned operations in the agricultural field." Zhao Chunjiang introduced. Nowadays, the new generation of artificial intelligence is leapfrogging and transforming from a single robot in the past to an intelligent autonomous system with multi-level collaboration. The agricultural autonomous unmanned system is composed of an unmanned platform and a number of auxiliary equipment, which has the ability to perceive, interact and learn, and can make independent reasoning and decision-making based on knowledge, so as to achieve the organic whole of the unmanned production management goal. However, compared with other industries, agricultural production is more complex, such as the large differences in farmland terrain and soil conditions in different regions, the complex and changeable demand for agronomic production, and too many uncertain influencing factors, and unstructured application scenarios have brought many challenges to mechanized and intelligent production.
Perception technology is an important core technology of agricultural autonomous unmanned system. "The use of intelligent robots to engage in field operations, first of all, we must have enough understanding of the situational information of the entire farmland, otherwise the machine cannot make a reasonable judgment on the situation in front of the position, and it is difficult to carry out unmanned operations in the field." Zhao Chunjiang pointed out that the development of autonomous unmanned agricultural operations requires the study of complex farmland environment perception and cognition methods, so as to build a farmland scene model for the whole unmanned operation. It is necessary to integrate cognitive technologies such as agricultural scenario perception, machine vision, and automatic planning into hardware such as sensors and actuators through the use of perception technology, so that the machinery and equipment can understand the basic conditions such as the topography and landform of the entire farmland and the relationship between working objects, so that the intelligent system has the ability to make appropriate judgments in various unknown environments, so as to flexibly deal with different agricultural tasks. With the continuous improvement and breakthrough of key core technologies, autonomous driving tractors have gradually been applied in batches, and in the future, more versatile intelligent agricultural machinery and equipment will gradually replace manpower for complex vegetable production.
Author丨Pan Fengyi Photography丨Tan Jiafu Xie Jinyang Editor丨Nong Caijun Contact Nong Caijun丨18565265490
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