Gansu Province has deployed 70 Beidou-enabled smart orchard management machines to enhance agricultural efficiency. The demonstration and training event for these machines, part of a provincial agricultural machinery R&D and application project, was held in Jingning County. The first batch of 70 units has been allocated to major apple-producing regions such as Pingliang, Qingyang, and Tianshui, aiming to promote intelligent, large-scale, standardized, and intensive orchard production.
The newly introduced smart orchard management machines integrate multiple functions, including spraying, fertilizing, mowing, transportation, and harvesting. Featuring modular design, the equipment is equipped with a multi-source control system combining Beidou navigation, inertial navigation, LiDAR, and binocular cameras. It supports rapid switching between tasks like spraying and fertilizing, while offering autonomous obstacle avoidance and remote monitoring capabilities. Compared to traditional manual labor, these machines significantly improve apple harvesting efficiency, shorten operational cycles, and reduce labor costs. Their adaptability to hilly terrains enables fully intelligent and electric orchard operations.
Upon full implementation, the project is expected to deploy 4,000 units across the province, saving approximately 220 million yuan in annual operational costs and boosting orchard mechanization rates by over 20 percentage points.