Agricultural engineering is an important material basis and guarantee for realizing agricultural modernization, which generally refers to agricultural engineering technology, agricultural engineering discipline and agricultural engineering construction. From the perspective of rural revitalization in China, with the expansion of agricultural engineering service objects as the main line, this paper analyzes the development process and characteristics of agricultural engineering in typical countries and regions such as the United States, Europe and East Asia, and extracts and summarizes the general rule of the development of agricultural engineering in the world. According to this rule, deductive reasoning is made on the development status and the current stage of China’s agricultural engineering, and the enlightenment is summarized in combination with China’s national conditions and rural revitalization needs. The results show that according to the expansion of service objects, the world's agricultural engineering has experienced the evolution from Agricultural engineering 1.0 to Agricultural engineering 4.0: Agricultural engineering 1.0, which serves simple agricultural production; Agricultural engineering 2.0, which occurs after the discipline is created and mainly serves agricultural production; Agricultural engineering 3.0, which pays equal attention to agricultural production and rural construction; Agricultural engineering 4.0, with the service object expanded to biological system, namely biological system engineering; the development of agricultural engineering in the world is characterized by focusing on production in the early stage and paying equal attention to production and life in the later stage. Its development is greatly affected by the development of other science and technology, and the driving force of change comes from social needs. From the perspective of rural revitalization, combined with the stage and characteristics of China’s agricultural and rural development, as well as the common development strategy of agriculture, rural areas, and farmers, the inspiration for China from the development laws of world agricultural engineering is that currently China should vigorously develop Agricultural engineering 3.0, for which serving agriculture and rural areas is equally important.