Harvesting rovers
A pair of machines: the Bees find and pick the ripe fruit, the Queen takes the crop and holds the cold chain right there in the field. No weekends off, no sick days, no seasonal shortage of hands.
The Bee rover
The first of the pair: it straddles the bed, finds the ripe fruit itself and picks with eight arms — one berry at a time, without crushing it.
Bee
An autonomous rover for picking strawberries: it drives over the bed, with the bed passing between the wheels and the wheels running in the alleys. A rocker-bogie 6×6 chassis; track width and height adjust to your planting layout. Navigation works on two levels: the rover follows the rows by sight, while the farm's own RTK base refines its position to the centimetre. The picking module has eight arms, and a neural network decides on every berry — take it now, or leave it to ripen.
The problem
Picking is up to half the cost of a berry crop. Seasonal workers get scarcer every year and cost more. And fruit does not wait: overripe means lost.
Sees fruit better than a person. And never tires.
The neural networks run on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin (up to 275 TOPS) on board: the rover finds the fruit itself, judges how ripe it is and decides whether to take it now or leave it to ripen.
Eight arms work at once without getting in each other's way. The machine's vision is shared, so no berry is ever hunted for twice. The fruit comes away with its stem — the flesh is untouched, and shelf life is not lost at the first contact.
A sorting conveyor runs under the belly: size and quality are determined as the fruit is picked, with no stopping and no separate weighing step. The sorting criteria are set from the dashboard and can be changed while the machine works.
What that means in fruit
Eight arms, five seconds a berry. The rest is arithmetic.
Run the numbers for your own field
Where the assumptions are. Five seconds is the design target for the cycle, not a measured result: the perception and approach loop works, and field statistics are still being collected. Thirty grams is a large first-grade berry; averaged over a season it comes out lower. And the important one: round-the-clock work is limited by the field, not by the machine — the rover picks exactly as much as has ripened. On twelve hectares of strawberries a whole season's crop is roughly seventy days of continuous picking, so the machine is not oversized. It is matched to the farm.
One platform, all year round
The brains, the power and the perception live in the base unit and never change. The chassis and the working modules swap out by season and by task. For the base unit, changing a module is like changing a bit in a drill.
Fruit picking
Eight arms, a sorting conveyor, and runner trimming with the same tooling.
in development
Weeding
The same perception, a different class of target: a weed detector instead of a berry detector.
in development
Spraying
Treatment aimed at the individual plant rather than blanket coverage — chemical use drops several times over.
configuration
Mowing
Alleys and headlands. Vision as the safety net: do not mow the plants, the hoses or anything that should not be there.
configuration
Snow clearing
The one winter module, paired with battery heating. Tracks, the Hive station, the shed.
configuration
Planting
An RTK planting grid: the rover plants the field to suit itself — to the geometry it will later pick in.
configuration
The technology
Two-level navigation
The cameras are the primary source of truth: the rover follows the rows by sight. The farm's RTK base corrects its position to the centimetre.
Computer vision
Depth cameras and neural networks: the rover tells ripe fruit from green and picks it without damage.
360° awareness
Six surround cameras, two lidars and ultrasound in the blind spots — built for a real field, not a laboratory.
18 kWh of power
LiFePO4 with per-cell BMS monitoring, ~10 hours of work, and a battery swap at the Hive in minutes.
Autonomy on board
Everything time-critical is computed on board and does not depend on a connection. Lose the internet and the rover keeps working.
Harvest forecast
The rover sees not only what is ripe but what is ripening. The dashboard builds a picking calendar: how many kilograms will be ready on which day.
The concept in 3D
This is how the machine looks and how it is laid out: the hull above the bed, rocker-bogie suspension, eight arms, the conveyor underneath. The proportions are conceptual — drag it around to have a look.
The Queen rover
The second of the pair: the Bees pick, the Queen receives, chills and carries away.
Queen
A separate, larger machine with its own chassis and a refrigerated body (down to +2 °C, chilling the fruit straight off the field). A Bee pulls up, the Queen takes the loaded crates out herself, sorts them inside by size and quality (grades 1, 2 and 3) and hands back empties. The fruit is never repacked after picking: the rover laid it out properly back in the bed, and from there only the crates move.
The swarm
The field is split into zones, and each Bee gets its own rows. Coordination is minimal and therefore dependable: if any one rover drops out, the work does not stop — its neighbours divide up the zone.
Hive — the station that keeps them running
Charging and automatic battery swaps, powered by the farm's own supply, solar included. Downtime is measured in minutes.
Swarm logic
The Bees do not talk to each other directly. The dashboard works out every schedule: who picks where, when to meet the Queen, when to head for the station.
The AXM ecosystem
The swarm is run from the dashboard: field map, cameras, ripening forecast, tasks and sorting criteria. Read more
Will it fit your field
The rover drives over the bed: the bed passes between the wheels, the wheels run in the alleys. That puts some requirements on the field. Here they are, with no small print.
The track width adjusts
This is the first thing everyone asks. The track adjusts to your planting layout — you do not have to replant a field to suit the machine. Ground clearance adjusts with it, to the height of the plants you actually grow.
Beds and alleys
You need row planting with a drivable alley between beds: strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries. The alley has to be passable — no deep ruts or washouts after rain.
Positioning and power
The rover steers by sight, and an RTK base refines its position to the centimetre — that base is built into the Beekeeper weather station. The Hive station needs a power connection: the farm's mains or solar panels both work.
Not sure your field is a fit? Send us the planting layout and the parcel number. We will look and tell you honestly — including if the answer is no.
What if it breaks mid-season
Fruit does not wait. We said so ourselves further up this page, which means we owe you an answer about our own machines.
A replacement machine while yours is repaired
Picking must not stop. While yours is in the workshop we put a replacement rover in the field, and the harvest carries on.
Service after the sale
Scheduled servicing, spare parts, firmware and recognition-model updates. A machine that stops being updated picks a little worse every season.
Visible before it fails
The dashboard logs telemetry from every subsystem: drive currents, vibration, wear. Some failures announce themselves in advance — and get fixed before the season rather than in the middle of it.