Robotic revolution is brewing in China’s traditional tea gardens

In a lush tea garden in the southern Chinese city of Huizhou, Guangdong province, a humanoid robot delicately plucks tender tea leaves alongside workers. With a bamboo basket on its left arm and its right hand moving with surprising precision, the machine accurately selects only the freshest buds.

An AI robot picks tea leaves in Huizhou, Guangdong province. The robot can be deployed across a wide range of assignments.

This isn’t a scene from a science fiction film. It’s China’s latest push to blend cutting-edge embodied artificial intelligence with its long-standing tea-picking tradition. The Chinese government has designated embodied intelligence as an industry of the future that it intends to cultivate.

During tea-picking peak seasons, many gardens face a shortage of tea-pickers. Tea-picking robots have emerged as a sought-after alternative solution. The robots combine vision-language models with specialized expert systems to handle complex, unstructured tasks that traditional industrial robots cannot manage. This development comes as China’s humanoid robot industry gained momentum, with AI-powered robots increasingly being used in agricultural settings nationwide.

Intelligent robots are sparking an agricultural revolution in China.