Farm robotics is a sub-category of the AgTech sector. See all definitions of FoodTech and its categories here.

The “farm robotics” FoodTech category regroups startups providing farmers with robots to replace or complement humans for challenging jobs.

The world of agriculture has always been looking for more automation and solutions to improve productivity and reduce the most difficult human tasks. From sensitive fruits pickers to weed-removing robots, there is a wide range of robots to answer agricultural issues and help farmers in their daily tasks.

Farm robotics companies are working on hardware products but it is the “intelligence” inside the robots which makes the difference. Contrary to classic “automatic devices” used in farms to perform repetitive tasks, robots developed by startups are full of artificial intelligence and generally use machine learning vision systems to be able to determine if a fruit is ripe, healthy or not, or ready to pick.

Even though we have been talking about it for a long time, farm robotics is still in its R&D stage. Robots are not yet on every farm and a lot of experiments are still required. Thus, investments in this sector are still limited too because startups are not ready to grow commercially.

Key startups to consider

• Vitibot (FR, picture), which develops an electric vine straddle robot
• Ecorobotix (CH), which builds an autonomous weeding robot
• Harvest Croo Robotics (USA), which builds sensitive fruits pickers
• Nexus Robotics (CA), which develops weed-removing robots

DigitalFoodLab’s additional insights

• 19/02/2021 – Are robots finally here?