Israeli startup Picker AgRobotics is building an orchard harvester whose robot arms are long, flexible and hollow. Instead of gripping a fruit, pulling it and carrying it back to a conveyor, the arm snakes between branches, cuts the stem and lets the fruit roll down the inside of the arm into the farmer's existing bin. The company calls the method "Snip-N-Roll".
Cofounder and chief executive Yossi Rosenblum described the design to AgFunderNews at the World Agri-Tech innovation summit in London. "There's no gripper," he said. "We just approach the fruit, cut the stem, and let the fruit roll through the [hollow] arm." He said other robotic harvesters pick and place one fruit at a time with rigid arms, which makes them expensive and slow, and that the short rigid arms can barely reach 30% of the fruit on a large tree, while Picker is aiming for 95%.
The company started by training its system on avocados, which grow on big, untrimmed, deep trees with green fruit among green leaves. Rosenblum's reasoning is that a machine that can harvest avocados can also do oranges, lemons, pears and apples, and that avocado growers currently have no robotic option at all. Because the arm is long enough, growers do not need to replant at high density, trellis their trees or prune them in a special way.
The harvester is not a self-driving machine in its own right. It is towed: one tractor driver or one autonomous vehicle can move four or five units from tree to tree. AI vision models decide fruit by fruit on ripeness, size and quality, so the grower picks what will sell and gets a record of what came off each tree and what is left on it.
On cost, Rosenblum gave the example of citrus in California's Central Valley, where a 900lb bin is harvested for $25 and Picker says it can do it for $20. The company plans to start with leasing, at a harvest cost about 20% below manual picking, and says a grower who later buys the machine would harvest at about 50% below the cost of manual labour. It will sell directly to large growers first and through dealers to mid-sized and small farms later.
Picker AgRobotics was founded in February 2025. It has built four units so far, each a new generation, and has been testing them in orchards near its office. Customer pilots are due to start in January 2027, with five more units added, beginning in Israel and then moving to California and probably Spain.
The interview was conducted by Elaine Watson of AgFunderNews.
Photo: B.navez / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: AgFunderNews
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