BerryBot is a robot with a mechaical arm that picks strawberries. It is operated by artificial intelligence and helps cut down labour force and harvest loss. BerryBot is incubated at the University of Tartu sTARTUp Lab STARTERtartu programme.

This year many Estonian strawberry producers lost 60-70% of harvest due to labour shortage. The docent of Estonian University of Life Sciences Ulvi Mooring has estimated the magnitude of damage according to which 13 farmers lost a total of 2000 tonnes of strawberries amounting to a minimum of 6 million EUR loss. Consequently, there is a proposal in the government to compensate the harvest losses in an amount of 4.8 million EUR.

The team consist of Sagar Yadav, an entrepreneur from India residing in Estonia and Karina Rao who is studying data science at the University of Tartu. The team is aided by external mentors, namely Uding Joseph and Ruoshi Wen. According to Sagar Yadav, the idea came when he was attending STARTERtartu programme and he formed a team to participate in the programme.

BerryBot was awarded second place at AgriFood Hack 2020 Regional and received the cash prize of 1000 EUR. They also got a special prize of 500 EUR by EIT(European Institute of Innovation & Technology). AgriFood 2020 is a hackathon focused on dealing with ideas concerning food and agriculture.

BerryBot now plans to register the company, assemble the working prototype and figure out operational processes required to put the robot in the field. In 2021, they will do field operations with a selected number of farmers. The farmers who want to use our robots can register their interest by sending email at sagar@sagaryadav.com. Their goal is to optimise the operations around BerryBot before making it available to everyone in 2022.