Strawberry Picking Robot: Field Crews to ABB Grippers

A strawberry picking robot has to do something farm machines have struggled with for decades: find a ripe berry under the leaves, judge its colour, and take it off the plant without a bruise. Strawberries are still picked by hand, mostly by seasonal crews bent over long rows. This post follows the job from the first garden strawberries and California field crews to table-top growing and the first picking prototypes, looks at the robots working strawberry farms in 2026, and sets out where ABB robots already handle soft food and could take the fruit after it leaves the field.

A picker carries a tray of strawberries on a farm field in Quebec, Canada, 2019. Photo: Marc-Lautenbacher / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How strawberries were picked by hand for two centuries

The berry itself is fairly new. The garden strawberry was bred in Brittany in the 1750s by crossing a wild strawberry from eastern North America with a Chilean species that the explorer Amédée-François Frézier had brought to France in 1714. From then on the crop was picked the way it still mostly is: by hand, straight into shallow boxes in the field. A photograph of pickers at Bell, California, around 1910 shows the method, with pickers spread along low rows and filled crates of berries stacked in the foreground.

Strawberry pickers and filled crates in a field at Bell, California, around 1910. Photo: California Historical Society via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Picking was skilled and backbreaking work, and it shaped who farmed. When Dorothea Lange photographed a family picking near Mission San Jose at the start of the 1942 season, her caption noted that for many years about 95 percent of California's strawberry crop had been grown by farmers of Japanese ancestry. Their forced removal that spring left 50 strawberry farms empty in Santa Clara County alone. The rows were the same as in 1910, low beds that pickers worked on their knees or bent double.

Family labor in a strawberry field near Mission San Jose, California, at the start of the 1942 season. Photo: Dorothea Lange via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Growers then raised the plants. Many British farms moved strawberries into polytunnels and onto raised table-tops, which lifts the fruit off the ground, makes picking easier for people and gives a machine a clearer view. Robots arrived on that layout. Japanese researchers built a harvesting robot for table-top strawberries in 2008, and a 2010 version with a scissor-like cutter succeeded on about 35 to 41 percent of attempts. In Florida, Harvest CROO Robotics tested field pickers, and co-founder Gary Wishnatzki said one could pick a 25 acre field in three days and replace a crew of about 30 workers.

UC Davis professor Stavros Vougioukas with a prototype strawberry harvest aid robot, 2014. Photo: Watson Lu, UC Davis College of Engineering via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Strawberry robots on farms in 2026 and where ABB fits

The strawberry robots working at scale today mostly treat the crop. DEVELOP3D reported on 17 September 2026 that about 200 Thorvald robots from Saga Robotics now treat more than 30 percent of the strawberries grown in the UK. Thorvald began in 2014 as a master's project by Lars Grimstad and his supervisor Pål Johan From at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. It straddles crop rows on a light aluminium frame, uses cameras, lidar and GPS, and shines UV-C light on the plants to stop powdery mildew, a disease that can cut yields by 20 to 70 percent. One worker can run six to ten robots from an app, and the robot logs data on every berry it passes.

Strawberries growing on raised table-tops inside a polytunnel in England, 2010. Photo: David Anstiss / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Picking machines have moved more slowly. A 2022 review in Precision Agriculture lists Dogtooth's and Agrobot's systems from 2018, the second carrying many independent pickers on one mobile base, and Harvest CROO's 2020 machine with 16 robotic picking heads. In the US, TRIC Robotics said in August 2026 that it had scaled to a fleet of 15 robots covering 1,500 acres of strawberries. At Agritechnica 2023 in Hanover, Octiva showed a strawberry picking robot that runs on rails, which makes navigation much simpler than in an open field.

A strawberry picking robot on rails by Octiva on show at Agritechnica 2023 in Hanover. Photo: MB-one / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make a strawberry picker, and no ABB strawberry farm project has been announced. Its robots do handle soft food every day, though. At the Delicato bakery, IRB 360 FlexPicker robots pick chocolate balls, and a soft FlexPicker gripper handles delicate pastries. A strawberry packhouse filling punnets has a similar job. For wetter, dirtier places, the IRB 1300 comes with Foundry Plus 2 protection against water and dust. Grip forces and paths for jobs like these are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio. Using them for berries remains a possibility.

A soft FlexPicker gripper built for delicate pastries. Photo: ABB

Where strawberry picking robots go next

Research money is moving toward farm robots that can do more than one job. In September 2026 Cornell announced a four year, 7.5 million dollar grant from the US Department of Agriculture to set up a Center of Excellence for Orchard Robotics, working with nine organizations on robots that pollinate, thin, harvest and weed. The crop there is apples, and the reasons carry over to strawberries. Manoj Karkee, who leads it, points to repetitive motion injuries among pickers and wants to create jobs building, maintaining and supervising the machines.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

For homes, strawberries are a garden and balcony crop, and nobody needs a robot to pick a few pots. The household link is indirect. Indoor farms, covered in our post on indoor vertical farming, are the most controlled setting a picking robot could ask for, with fixed racks, steady light and no weather. For factories and packhouses, the near term is clearer. The robots will take over the handling after the field, as they already have for other fruit in fruit packhouses.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots picking chocolate balls at Delicato. Photo: ABB

The open problems are cost, safety and skills. A picker has to be cheaper per punnet than a seasonal crew and fast enough to clear a field before the berries go soft, and Harvest CROO's 16 heads show how much hardware that takes. Robots on farms work among people on uneven ground, so they need safe speeds and reliable stopping. And the work changes shape, as Saga's model already shows, from picking every berry by hand to running six to ten machines from an app and stepping in when one gets stuck.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer, the kind of robot that stacks finished cases at the end of a packing line. Photo: ABB

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