Greenhouse Harvest Robot: Glasshouse to ABB

A tomato greenhouse looks like the easiest place on a farm to automate. The rows are straight, the floor is concrete or rails, the weather never changes and the plants are trained up wires to a height a machine can reach. Yet most greenhouse tomatoes and sweet peppers are still picked by hand. This post follows the work from the early Dutch glasshouses to the pipe rail trolleys that pickers ride today, looks at the greenhouse harvest robot projects now reaching growers in Germany and Japan, and explains where ABB robots already work in the produce chain and where they might go next.

Rows of ripening cherry tomatoes in a greenhouse at Sitia, Crete, 2026. Photo: Petro Stelte / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How glasshouse growers picked by hand

The Westland, the strip of coast between The Hague and Rotterdam, became the centre of Dutch glasshouse growing, and photos from the 1940s show what the work looked like. Growers knelt on soil beds under the glass to set out young tomato plants, and every later job, from tying the stems to picking, was done on foot along the rows. Glass came in standard panes; in the UK and Northern Europe a "Dutch Light" of 730 by 1,420 mm was a common unit. Harvesting meant walking each row every few days, checking colour by eye and twisting or cutting each fruit or truss.

Growers in the Westland set out young tomato plants in a glasshouse, May 1946. Photo: Charles Breijer / Anefo, Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The biggest change before robots was in how the greenhouse was built. Plastic film in the 1960s made cheap hoop houses possible, and gutter connected greenhouses, with many bays under one roof, spread in the 1980s and 1990s. Inside, tomatoes and cucumbers moved off the soil and onto substrate slabs, with the stems trained high on wires. The hot water heating pipes that run along the floor between rows were then used as rails. Pickers stand on electric trolleys that run along those pipes and lift them to the height of the fruit, and that is how most glasshouse crops are harvested today.

A worker between tall rows of tomato plants in a Dutch glasshouse. Photo: Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Researchers saw the rails as an opening for machines. In Japan, a robotic system for cucumber harvesting was described in the JIRCAS journal JARQ in 1996. At Wageningen in the Netherlands, Eldert van Henten's team published an autonomous cucumber harvesting robot in 2002: in field tests it picked about 80 percent of the cucumbers without help, at an average of 45 seconds each. The EU funded SWEEPER project, with Ben Gurion University, Wageningen and the grower De Tuindershoek, showed its sweet pepper robot in September 2018. It took about 24 seconds per fruit with a success rate of 62 percent.

Gardeners Lasse Blomqvist and Väinö Opponen tend a cucumber greenhouse in Westend, Finland, March 1961. Photo: Erkki Voutilainen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Tomato and pepper robots moving into real greenhouses

This autumn brought fresh news from Germany. The Cool Down reported on September 24, 2026 on Polybot, a Tübingen startup spun out of the ELLIS Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Its truss tomato harvester is trained end to end on demonstrations by human pickers instead of hand coded rules. It made its first autonomous pick in May 2025 and was harvesting full greenhouse rows by December 2025. A full pilot was planned for summer 2026, and the company says deliveries to growers could begin in early 2027.

Octiva's strawberry picking robot on rails, shown with Continental at Agritechnica 2023 in Hanover. Photo: MB-one / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Japan has a robot in routine use. FreshPlaza reported that Tokuiten put a suction type cherry tomato harvesting robot into regular production on May 25, 2026, on a 2,000 square metre organic farm in Chita, Aichi Prefecture. It picks about 31 kg a day per unit, roughly half what one human picker does in a session, and the company is building a one hectare greenhouse for six robots by March 2027. Labour is what drives this. Hortidaily reported on October 6, 2026 that a UK soft fruit grower expects seasonal labour shortages after 2030.

Glasshouses cover the Westland in the Netherlands, seen from a plane in 2018. Photo: Paul Arps / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB does not build a harvesting robot, and we found no ABB greenhouse picking project. Its robots are already in the produce chain after the harvest, though. At Orora Fresh Packaging in Kingsville, Ontario, a greenhouse district on Lake Erie, two ABB IRB 4600 robots stack the cardboard trays that fresh produce is packed in. In packhouses, IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots and IRB 460 and 660 palletizers are standard tools for packing and stacking food, and that is where an ABB robot most likely meets a tomato today. Our post on indoor vertical farming covers the related case of stacked growing racks.

An ABB IRB 4600 in the Orora Fresh Packaging cell that stacks produce trays in Kingsville, Ontario. Photo: ABB

What it will take to harvest whole greenhouses by robot

A greenhouse robot is a mobile manipulator: a cart on the pipe rails, cameras, and an arm with a gripper that does not bruise fruit. That last part is where ABB's collaborative arms could plausibly fit. A GoFa CRB 15000 is built to work beside people and stop on contact, which matters when pickers and robots share a row. This is a possibility; no ABB greenhouse product exists. Engineers would likely plan reach and cycle times in RobotStudio before building a rail cart around any arm.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

Speed is still the main gap. SWEEPER needed 24 seconds per pepper, and Tokuiten's robot picks about half of what one person does in a session. A robot that misses one fruit in three also leaves work for people anyway. Then there is cost: growers pay for a robot all year, while tomato and pepper harvests have peaks. Learning from demonstrations, as Polybot does, aims at the hardest part, which is the endless variation of leaves, stems and trusses in a living crop.

Tomato plants climb under plastic sheeting in a greenhouse on a Libyan farm, 2025. Photo: Mhmd.abdrzg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

For home growers, the picture is simpler. A backyard greenhouse with a few tomato plants will be picked by hand for a long time, and that is part of the pleasure. What households will notice first is in the supply chain: steadier supplies of greenhouse tomatoes and peppers when labour is short, and packed trays moved by mobile robots like ABB's Flexley Mover between packhouse and truck. Robots already harvest other indoor crops, as our post on the mushroom harvesting robot shows.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

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