Li Han

Driven by artificial intelligence, multi-source sensing, agricultural robots and big data technologies, global agriculture is rapidly upgrading from precision agriculture and agriculture 4.0 to agriculture 5.0. Artificial intelligence has evolved from a single diagnostic tool to an intelligent system that integrates the “perception-decision-execution” process throughout. It is widely applied in crop phenotype analysis, remote sensing monitoring, yield prediction, and autonomous operation of intelligent equipment, etc. This article takes the framework of “intelligent perception-cognitive decision-autonomous execution” to systematically review the core technologies, typical applications, and frontier directions of agricultural artificial intelligence. It focuses on introducing the progress of key technologies such as three-dimensional phenotype, hyperspectral remote sensing, multimodal fusion, and causal machine learning, as well as their value in improving resource utilization efficiency, enhancing climate resilience, and supporting field precision management. At the same time, it points out that current agricultural AI still faces practical bottlenecks such as insufficient generalization ability of models, scarce data and high annotation costs, difficulties in edge deployment, barriers in multi-source data integration, and weak interpretability and engineering reliability. Future research will focus on the construction of closed-loop autonomous farms, the collaboration of agricultural large models and intelligent agents, the construction of data centers and AI and data infrastructure, and the development of green and low-cost AI research. This will provide support for the technological innovation and industrialization implementation of agricultural artificial intelligence.

Agricultural AI agents play a crucial role in the evolution of smart agriculture, from single-point automated applications to intelligent systems driven by tasks, collaborative decision-making, and closed-loop execution. However, their practical implementation still faces key challenges, such as heterogeneous agricultural data processing, insufficient cross-scenario generalization ability, complexity of multi-agent collaboration, difficulties in integrating software and hardware, and insufficient security and trust guarantees in real agricultural environments. This paper presents a systematic review of the architecture design, business processes, key technologies, and future challenges of agricultural AI agents. Agricultural AI agents are classified into two types: virtual agricultural AI agents and embodied agricultural AI agents. The paper summarizes a four-layer system architecture consisting of the infrastructure layer, agent management layer, agent collaboration layer, and application layer. The paper also analyzes the model capabilities required by agricultural AI agents from four typical business dimensions: perception and state understanding, knowledge memory and experience management, reasoning decision-making and task planning, and collaborative execution and resource scheduling. This research shows that technologies such as multimodal perception, knowledge graphs, retrieval-enhanced generation, digital twins, reinforcement learning, and multi-agent collaboration can provide important support for agricultural AI agents to enhance their environmental understanding, knowledge reuse, autonomous decision-making, and physical execution capabilities. Future research should focus on robust perception in open environments, long-term memory and knowledge evolution, reliable multi-agent collaboration, edge-cloud collaborative deployment, and secure and trustworthy human–machine collaboration. Integrating agricultural domain knowledge with intelligent agent technology is an important direction for promoting the large-scale, adaptive, and sustainable application of agricultural AI agents.