As a critical component of field management, cultivation and weeding significantly influence the yield and quality of crops. Currently the domestic cultivation and weeding operation mainly relies on mechanical working parts, while chemical and biological technologies are usually applied to weeding operation alone. In the context of realizing modern and sustainable agriculture, efficient mechanical weeding components and their supporting intelligent control technology have gradually become the core direction of the industry's development. Relying on the advantages of flat and continuous farmland, European and American modular farms focus on the development of chemical weed control system with precision variable spraying as the core; while Japan, characterized by intensive cultivation, has developed a variety of advanced weeding-cultivating machine under the conditions of small fields, which occupies the technological commanding heights of the international agricultural equipment market. In this paper, the research progress of cultivation and weeding techniques is systematically described from two dimensions of equipment classification and application, and intelligent control technology. The technical characteristics of four types of inter-row and inter-plant operation equipment, namely, pivoting type, oscillating type, fixed rotary type and shovel type, are summarized. At the same time, the application of mainstream technologies such as image processing, deep learning, sensor fusion and satellite navigation in the field of intelligent control is introduced in detail focusing on the two major aspects of plant sensing and identification, path control and decision-making. Based on the results of domestic and international experiments, this paper further discusses the shortcomings of the existing equipment and control technology in terms of weed removal rate, seedling injury rate, durability and adaptability, and thus looks forward to the future of cultivation and weeding technology, which will continue to take high quality and high efficiency as the core objective, with a particular emphasis on the development and fusion of intelligent precision, greening, integration, and bionic material technology.