Picker AgRobotics Targets 95% Fruit Capture With Gripper-Free Harvesting Arms
19 October 2026, Israel: Israeli startup Picker AgRobotics has built and field-tested four generations of a fruit-harvesting robot that uses hollow, flexible arms instead of the gripping claws found on most existing harvesting machines, cofounder and chief executive Yossi Rosenblum said in an interview at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in London on October 6.
Most robotic harvesters on the market use a pick-and-place motion: a gripper closes around the fruit, pulls it free, retracts, and deposits it somewhere, then repeats the cycle. Rosenblum said that approach tends to be slow and expensive, and often only works well in orchards planted in specific layouts, such as high-density or trellised rows, because a rigid arm needs a clear, predictable path to the fruit.
Picker’s arms work differently. Each arm is hollow and flexible enough to snake through branches and foliage to reach fruit anywhere in the canopy. Instead of gripping, the arm cuts the fruit’s stem, and the fruit then rolls down through the inside of the hollow arm into a standard harvest bin. The company calls this approach “Snip-N-Roll.” Because there is no retraction cycle and no need for a specific tree structure, Rosenblum said the system is designed to work in existing orchards without requiring growers to replant in high-density rows or install trellising.
How the system works and what it has been tested on
Real-time computer vision models mounted on the robot assess each piece of fruit for ripeness, size and quality before the arm picks it, and the system logs data at the level of an individual tree, recording what was harvested and what fruit remains in the canopy for a later pass. The hardware units are towable and attach behind a tractor, and Picker’s design allows one operator, or eventually one autonomous vehicle, to oversee four or five harvesting units working at once.
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Picker began development in February 2025 and has since built four successive generations of the hardware, each tested in orchards near the company’s base in Israel. It chose avocado as its first target crop specifically because avocado trees have dense canopies and deep foliage that make it hard for both humans and machines to spot ripe fruit, a deliberately difficult starting point. The company plans to expand next to citrus, lemons, pears and apples.
Rosenblum said the company is aiming for a 95 percent fruit-capture rate, and characterized competing rigid, short-armed harvesters as capturing roughly 30 percent of available fruit in similarly demanding conditions, though that comparison is his own characterization of competitors rather than an independently measured benchmark. Using California’s Central Valley as an example, he said manual citrus harvesting currently costs about $25 per 900-pound bin, and that Picker’s system could bring that down to around $20 per bin from the outset under a leasing arrangement, with a goal of reaching costs 20 percent below current manual harvesting under that lease model, or 50 percent below manual labor costs if a grower later buys the equipment outright.
It is worth noting that these figures, along with the 95 percent capture target, are company projections and characterizations rather than results from an independently verified commercial harvest. Picker has not yet run customer pilots. Those are scheduled to begin in January 2027, starting in Israel before expanding to California and potentially Spain, with six units planned to be operating by the end of that year.
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