Robotic revolution is brewing in China's traditional tea gardens

GUANGZHOU — In a lush tea garden in the southern Chinese city of Huizhou, Guangdong province, a humanoid robot named Xunxiao 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.

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.

Xunxiao, developed by the Youibot-XJTU embodied intelligence robot research institute, represents a new generation of versatile robots. It combines vision-language models with specialized expert systems to handle complex, unstructured tasks that traditional industrial robots cannot manage.