Ya (Bill) Xiong is a Research Professor at the National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture (Nercita) at the Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences. He received his B.Sc. and M.Eng. from China Agricultural University, and an additional M.Sc. from Harper Adams University in the UK. At Harper Adams, under the supervision of Prof. Simon Blackmore, he successfully built a laser weeding robot capable of operating in both static and dynamic modes. During this time, he also completed an internship at Shadow Robotics in London.

In 2019, he earned his PhD from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at NMBU and a robotics engineer at Saga Robotics until the end of 2022. At NMBU, he focused on designing, developing, and integrating strawberry-harvesting robots and sampling robots in the Robotics Control Group under the supervision of Prof. Pål Johan From. In mid-2017, he was a visiting PhD student in Prof. Volkan Isler’s lab at the University of Minnesota in the USA. He also spent three months as a visiting researcher in Dr. Amir Ghalamzan’s lab at the University of Lincoln (UK).

Over the past seven years, he has successfully developed a world-leading strawberry-harvesting robot from scratch and a sampling robot. His work spans hardware to software, including gripper design, arm development, vision system development, picking path planning, manipulation control, system integration, and evaluation. In 2022, the strawberry harvester was fully automated, capable of continuously picking and collecting dozens of punnets of berries without interruption using two arms simultaneously.

In 2023, Ya Xiong left Norway to begin his professorship at Nercita, where he is currently working on the development of a new generation of strawberry-harvesting robots and laser weeding robots, aiming to be a pioneer in making agricultural robots available to farmers.