Research Progress on Intelligent Seeding Technology and Equipment: The Development of Seeders from Multi-Functional Integration to Agricultural Intelligent Agents

Seeding constitutes a key crop-production operation that governs seed spatial arrangement, crop population structure, and potential yield formation, and forms the foundation of precise, efficient, and eco-friendly farming. However, field soil properties, regional climate, and crop agronomic requirements exhibit strong spatio-temporal heterogeneity. Conventional seeding operations based on manual experience and fixed preset parameters cannot meet the demands of large-scale precision agriculture. Enabled by progress in precision agriculture, intelligent sensing, artificial intelligence, and autonomous machinery, modern intelligent seeding systems integrate precision seed metering, high-precision environmental perception, and closed-loop dynamic self-regulation. Such systems can improve plant-spacing uniformity and enable precise seeding-depth control under standard open-field conditions, yet face noticeable performance limitations in GNSS-denied complex environments including dense crop canopies and greenhouses. This review outlines the evolutionary trajectory of seeding machinery and summarizes research progress regarding precision seeding, multi-functional equipment integration, multi-source information perception, and intelligent decision-making. Integrated design principles covering mechanical optimization, electronic control, and perception-driven decision systems are elaborated. Four developmental phases of seeding equipment are identified: mechanical precision operation, electronic intelligent regulation, multi-functional module integration, and intelligent cognitive integration. Current intelligent seeding technologies are constrained by limited adaptability to complex farmland conditions, unstable multi-source data fusion, insufficient long-term operational reliability, and high deployment costs across diverse scenarios, restricting their broad field-scale adoption. Future research should combine agronomic knowledge with artificial intelligence to improve environmental awareness and autonomous decision-making capability, develop low-cost, high-reliability integrated seeding equipment, and support the construction of intelligent agricultural machinery systems.