At present, China has become a major producer and user of agricultural machinery in the world, and the mode of agricultural production has achieved a historical transformation from relying mainly on human and animal power to relying mainly on mechanical power. In particular, the application of intelligent agricultural equipment this year has played an important role in improving production efficiency, reducing personnel aggregation and effectively preventing and controlling the new coronary pneumonia epidemic, and has also provided broad prospects for the transformation and upgrading of agricultural equipment. At the same time, the development of intelligent agricultural equipment in China is still in its infancy, and there are still many problems to be overcome. How should agricultural machinery move towards intelligence?

Although it is a major producer and user of agricultural machinery in the world, where is the gap between China and the world?

Chen Xuegeng, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, pointed out that compared with developed countries, there is still a big gap in the R & D capability, manufacturing level, product quality, and production efficiency of the development of agricultural mechanization in China; there are still problems such as lack of core technology, unreasonable product structure, low manufacturing technology capability, poor integration of agronomic agricultural machinery and poor configuration of full mechanization.

He pointed out that the lack of reliability and durability of agricultural equipment is a weak link in my country's agricultural machinery, and it is also the main factor that my country's agricultural equipment has a weak voice in the world. "In particular, the basic key components efficiency improvement and reliability technology and other issues. In the process of promoting agricultural equipment information, intelligence, the first and foremost is to solve these basic problems."

It has to be said that in the four echelons of the global manufacturing industry, China is still in the third echelon, and this pattern is difficult to change fundamentally in a short period of time.

In recent years, compound, high-performance and intelligent modern agricultural machinery equipment has become a new bright spot in the development of agricultural equipment. Agricultural drones, unmanned tractors, intelligent harvesters, intelligent weeding machines, milking robots, agricultural automation and control systems and other industrial development is in the ascendant.

According to the survey, there are three categories of agricultural machinery equipment that are currently focused on the development of the world-autonomous tractors, agricultural robots, and drones. "At present, the focus of the development of agricultural machinery and equipment in my country is still to improve the intelligence, productivity and stability of agricultural equipment." Zhao Chunjiang, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that these three kinds of intelligent agricultural machinery equipment have given estimates internationally, and they also provide a reference for the future development of intelligent agricultural machinery equipment in my country.

The deep integration of modern information technology and agriculture has triggered the third revolution of agriculture-"Agricultural Digital Revolution"

Zhao Chunjiang said that the manifestation of the agricultural digital revolution is smart agriculture. Intelligent agriculture is the unity of the three major productivity elements of biotechnology, information technology and intelligent equipment, and it is the advanced stage of the development of agricultural informatization.

He introduced four types of intelligent agriculture-intensive land cultivation, intelligent agriculture of facilities, intelligent processing of agricultural products, and intelligent information services. "The biggest difference between intelligent agricultural equipment and traditional agricultural equipment is interactivity."

How to improve the intelligence of agricultural machinery equipment? The 2017 meeting of the European Machinery Manufacturers Association emphasized the role of the Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence in the intelligent improvement of agricultural machinery equipment, especially the neural networks, algorithms and their learning in artificial intelligence, which play an important role in improving the intelligence of agricultural machinery equipment.

Zhao Chunjiang said that the core of machine intelligence is computing, but only algorithms are not enough, but also data, which depends on the Internet of Things, including communications and sensors. "In the future, to improve the degree of intelligence of agricultural machinery and equipment, we must work around the Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence."

Wang Maohua, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that the development of artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, and it is necessary to think coldly about the upsurge of artificial intelligence and avoid using the term artificial intelligence as an adjective and labeling it at will.

In his view, the promotion of industrial application research in the field of artificial intelligence agriculture requires high-quality big data foundation, advanced algorithms that simulate the wisdom of the human brain, strong deep learning capabilities and high-level computing chip platform support.

Of course, the opportunities brought by artificial intelligence should not be underestimated. Wang Maohua pointed out that "in the top-level design, priority should be given to the development of artificial intelligence in agricultural equipment intelligent manufacturing and agricultural production, operation, management decision-making related application innovation research plan."

According to the classification of Case New Holland Industrial Group, there are 5 levels of intelligent classification of agricultural machinery equipment, namely, all-person control for auxiliary navigation, man-machine cooperation and optimization of all-person control, human-assisted automatic control under system environmental monitoring, unmanned automatic control under field supervision, and unmanned automatic control under remote supervision (no monitoring in field).

Zhao Chunjiang pointed out that the use of a new generation of artificial intelligence technology to improve machine intelligence, including big data intelligence, cross-media intelligence, group intelligence, man-machine hybrid enhanced intelligence, autonomous unmanned systems, etc.

He highlighted cross-media intelligence and human-machine hybrid enhanced intelligence. "In the future, cross-media intelligence will be used more in the agricultural field. Especially after the emergence of 5G technology, video data has proliferated, which is very important for how to comprehensively analyze, mine, reason and utilize image and voice data."

A machine completely relies on science and technology to improve its intelligence to a very high level. The cost and price are very high, and it cannot be used in agriculture. "In the future, unless it is done independently by machines under particularly complex conditions, humans and machines are interactive in many environments. Human and machine intelligence systems are coupled together to form stronger intelligence and collaborate on complex management tasks, allowing technology and products to be applied in actual production." Zhao Chunjiang said.

In this regard, the observation of the agricultural industry has three interpretations: 1) intelligent agricultural machinery is the cornerstone of China's agricultural modernization, and the popularization of intelligent agricultural machinery is accelerated to promote agricultural modernization and intelligent speed; 2) The business model in the field of intelligent agricultural machinery needs continuous innovation and jumps out of the agricultural machinery industry to build a new business model; 3) Accelerating the integration of intelligent agricultural machinery and agricultural industry will trigger the imagination of intelligent agricultural machinery.

Content source: China Science Daily, agricultural industry observation content.