To increase the productivity of human strawberry pickers, a robotics company has developed a semi-autonomous robot to follow harvesters through the field as they select and pick berries.

The StrawBot from Ag Pro Robotics is designed to minimize the back and forth that strawberry harvesters engage in, collecting strawberry trays and delivering them to collection points. Traveling alongside human pickers, the StrawBot takes over the task of delivering the filled trays to collection points.

Source: Ag Pro Robotics

Outfitted with a camera system, GPS navigation and data analytics, the StrawBot reportedly improves the productivity of strawberry pickers by 35%, allowing human pickers to focus on picking ripe berries instead of having to transport them.

For now, the robots do not replace human laborers due to their inability to determine the ripeness of berries and the difficulty these devices encounter handling the fragile fruit. However, the goal is to one day automate the entire process in a bid to solve current farm labor shortages.

The StrawBot joins a number of recent efforts to automate agricultural tasks including the recent debut of Future Acres “Carry” robot, which travels alongside farmers functioning as an autonomous harvesting assistant and a raspberry-picking robot developed by a University of Plymouth spin-out that picks up to 25,000 raspberries a day.

For more on the StrawBot, watch the accompanying video that appears courtesy of Ag Pro Robotics.