Public Funding for Hall Hunter Partnership (Farming)

Fieldwork Robotics Ltd develops soft, adaptive and modular robots for agriculture, and has demonstrated first commercial picking of raspberries with a robotic system. This project is focused on increasing the performance and robustness of Fieldwork Robotics' raspberry harvesting robot, aiming to accelerate its go to market strategy. This will be done in collaboration with Performance Projects Ltd, a leader in robust mobile platforms for agricultural robots, and the large UK berry grower Hall Hunter Partnership. The goal is to enable the first operational robotic harvesting services for UK raspberries, securing this important sector while reducing losses and wastage.

The **FLEXBOT** project aims to improve labour productivity in English soft fruit farming operations by integrating collaborative logistics robots (cobots) into the farms. Lead partner **Fox Robotics** will develop and showcase three primary outcomes: demonstrating the feasibility of supply chain interoperability between suppliers, exploring a sustainable business model for small to medium-sized fruit and crop farmers, and establishing an autonomous fruit-farming cobot undertaking various logistics tasks. The project aims to illustrate English fruit farms' scalable productivity and profitability while encouraging a small ecosystem of add-on suppliers and demonstrating the potential for cobot integration into other farm types. The project is a multidisciplinary collaborative R&D activity that aims to align with Defra recommendations and remediate significant fragmentation between technology providers and end-users. Fox Robotics will work with **Agri-EPI Centre**, **three British fruit farms**, and the **University of Surrey** on this project and hire four small innovative businesses to improve their value proposition to farmers by providing complementary technology, products, and services that can be integrated into the cobot platform and scaled as farmers invest in their fleet. The FLEXBOT project aims to move the fragmented and siloed Agri-tech industry towards standardisation using mobile cobot platforms.