Flower Bouquet Robot: From Aalsmeer Clocks to ABB

A flower bouquet robot has to do something florists find easy and machines find hard: pick up soft, uneven stems, turn each flower the right way and bind them without bruising a petal. This post traces how bouquets went from the florist's hands through the Dutch flower auctions at Aalsmeer, where the price clock automated selling long before anything automated tying. It then looks at the carousel machines and robots that bunch and bucket flowers today, this year's news from the flower trade, and where ABB's FlexPicker, GoFa and YuMi robots could fit in a bouquet line.

A bouquet of orange and white flowers wrapped in paper. Photo: Lizzie amianyuhua / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

How flowers were sold and tied by hand

For most of history a bouquet was tied by one person, stem by stem. A florist builds a hand-tied bouquet by adding stems at an angle so they spiral around a binding point, turning flowers like gerberas to face outward, and that takes practice. Selling the flowers was organized earlier. In late December 1911, growers in Aalsmeer near Amsterdam founded the Bloemenlust auction and sold their first lots in Café Welcome. On 5 January 1912 a second auction, the Central Aalsmeer Auction, started in a pub called Three Columns.

Buyers at the flower auction in Aalsmeer, with the auction clock on the wall, 1948. Photo: Nationaal Archief / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The Dutch auctions used a clock. The price on the dial starts high and drops until a buyer presses a button, so a lot can sell in a few seconds. The Aalsmeer auctions merged in 1968, opened a nine-hectare complex on the Legmeerdijk in 1972, and in 2008 joined FloraHolland to form Royal FloraHolland. Its Aalsmeer building covers about 999,000 square meters, and around 43 million flowers are sold there every day. Trains of flower trolleys moved the lots through the halls, but growers still tied the bunches by hand.

Rows of buyers' seats and auction clocks in the Aalsmeer flower auction hall, 1985. Photo: Rob Bogaerts / Anefo, Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Machines reached bouquet making much later, and the first ones still needed people at every stem. The French firm Mécaflor launched a carousel machine for hand-tied bouquets in 2014: workers place stems in a moving bowl, and the machine builds the spiral. By 2023 Mécaflor had sold nearly 100 of them, and with 12 operators the machine can make 1,200 or more 12-stem bouquets an hour. Robots came next. QuickFlora's FloraBot venture showed a robot that could arrange a dozen roses in about four minutes, against 15 to 17 minutes for a human designer.

Trolleys of flowers waiting in the Aalsmeer auction distribution hall, 1985. Photo: Rob Bogaerts / Anefo, Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Flower lines in 2026: bunches, buckets and data

Most robots in the flower trade today handle whole bunches. The Dutch company DERO sells a FlowerCollector that picks finished bunches and mixed bouquets and places them in buckets, up to 5,000 bunches an hour, and it can add a robot or cobot that palletizes the filled boxes. In greenhouses, ISO Horti Innovators and Robovision built a machine that uses 3D vision to cut rose cuttings to the right length and plant them, at about 1,600 to 1,800 cuttings an hour. Before that, workers cut each rose stem by hand at the right place and angle so it would grow into a new plant, a job that took both skill and time.

Trolleys of cut flowers in the Aalsmeer flower auction hall, 2011. Photo: Orangée / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

On 31 August FloralDaily reported that Floral Innovations is building an AI bouquet configurator that turns a buyer's chosen flowers into a picture of a finished bouquet, using the InfoFlowersPlants database of more than 8,000 varieties. Royal FloraHolland announced further steps in its flower order picking service in Aalsmeer for 10 and 24 September. And on 24 September Hackaday covered Daisy, a student robot by Jude Robinson that threads real daisies into a chain using V-shaped grippers to center stems of different sizes.

Buckets of pink, cream and yellow flowers on carts in the Aalsmeer distribution area, 2014. Photo: Krisztina Konczos / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ABB is not yet in a published bouquet project, but its picking robots fit parts of the job. The IRB 360 FlexPicker picks light items from moving conveyors, and the five-axis IRB 365, launched in 2022, can also turn products as it places them, which matters for flower heads. A student team at TU Delft's robotics minor showed in 2021 how roses can be picked from a belt with conveyor tracking for a sleeving machine, with one operator serving three robots. An ABB FlexPicker cell could in principle do the same job, though no such cell has been installed.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots picking items from a moving line. Photo: ABB

What a flower bouquet robot still needs

In packhouses, the next step is likely mixed lines where people choose and place the showy flowers while robots feed stems, sleeve finished bouquets, fill buckets and stack boxes. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot can work at a bench next to people, and a dual-arm YuMi was built for small, careful handling. ABB's PickMaster software, which links cameras to FlexPicker robots, could guide picks from a mixed belt of stems. Lines like this are usually designed and checked in RobotStudio before anyone touches a flower, since stems and buckets need room around every reach.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

The hard part is the flower itself. No two stems are the same length or curve, heads bruise easily, and leaves catch on each other in a pile. Daisy's builder found that stem shape and diameter mattered most for reliability, which is why he constrained the stems mechanically. Vision helps, as the rose cutting machine shows, but each new variety means new training. Cost is the other problem, because bouquet demand peaks around holidays like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day and drops in between.

An ABB YuMi dual-arm robot handling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

For homes and flower shops, a robot that ties your bouquet is still far away, because the florist's eye for color and shape is hard to copy. The near future looks more like the Floral Innovations configurator: software that lets a customer design a bouquet on a screen, with machines and robots doing more of the cutting, bunching and packing on farms and in Dutch distribution halls. The hand-tied bouquet on the shop counter will probably be tied by a florist for years yet.

Roses growing in a greenhouse at a flower farm, 2016. Photo: DavyKirii / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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