Abstract: Soya beansare not only popular in Asia as healthy food but are also becoming popular in North America. With the rapid development of China’s soya bean industry, the traditional manual picking mode can no longer meet the harvesting needs. There is an urgent need for high-efficiency and high-quality picking machines. By expounding the development history of soya bean harvesting machines at home and abroad, summarizing the working principles of related machines and the research status of main devices, combining the differences in demand for soya bean harvesting machinery in different domestic planting areas, and classifying domestic soya bean harvesting machinery through comparative analysis, it is concluded that the current soya bean harvesting machinery in China has a low mechanization rate, insufficient research on key picking devices, low harvest quality, and poor terrain adaptability. After systematically summarizing and analyzing China’s current soya bean planting characteristics and machine development trends, it is proposed that the development focus of mechanized picking lies in the in-depth study of the mechanism of picking devices, increase of the machine’s ability to adapt to the terrain of hills and mountains, and further integration of agricultural machinery and agronomy. This paper is expected to provide a reference for the development of soya bean harvesting mechanization.