From Automation to Intelligence: A Review of Key Technologies and Emerging Trends in Agricultural Irrigation and Drainage Machinery

Against the backdrop of growing global water scarcity and mounting food security pressures, the intelligent transformation of agricultural irrigation and drainage machinery is crucial for enhancing operational efficiency, reducing energy consumption, and ensuring reliable field operations. This paper systematically reviews the evolution of agricultural irrigation and drainage machinery from traditional manual operation and mechanized practices to automated control and intelligent decision-making. Within a closed-loop “sensing–decision-making–execution” framework, particular emphasis is placed on key technologies, including multisource sensing, intelligent decision-making, adaptive actuation, and precision control. The findings indicate that multiscale, multimodal information fusion enhances the observability of farmland environments and equipment conditions. Irrigation and drainage decision-making is shifting from timer-based, threshold-based, and empirical-rule-based approaches toward state prediction, mechanism-constrained control, and multi-objective optimization. Precision irrigation is advancing from state monitoring to predictive decision-making and closed-loop intelligent control. However, there are still key challenges such as data heterogeneity, insufficient cross-scenario model generalizability, and limitations in model interpretability and real-time performance. Future research should focus on integrated irrigation and drainage, multimodal spatiotemporal fusion, mechanism and data collaborative driving, cloud–edge–end collaborative intelligence, and standardized field verification to enhance the autonomous decision-making, precision operation, and long-term reliability of agricultural irrigation and drainage machinery in complex environments.