Fieldworker 1 vs B8 Harvester
Two harvesting machines, one verified table. Every figure below is sourced and dated; vendor claims are labelled and kept apart from independent results.
Cambridge/Plymouth-rooted raspberry harvesting robot with four soft picking arms and AI-enhanced 3D vision — spectral-frequency ripeness sensing removes human bias from pick decisions. Running a two-year harvesting-as-a-service programme with Place UK (Norfolk) and Littywood Farm (Stafford), backed by £3m funding; international trials planned in Portugal and Australia, commercial multi-robot fleets targeted from 2027.
Best for: Raspberry growers in the UK who want early access to soft-fruit harvest automation via a service programme rather than buying hardware.US (Tampa/Plant City, FL) autonomous strawberry harvester — 16 independently working picking robots on a wide self-propelled chassis span six beds (picking the middle four), using stereo/AI vision to identify ripe fruit and soft clamp-and-cut end effectors to pick without hand contact. Harvest CROO offers it as a harvesting service (lease + operations), not equipment for sale. In April 2025 the company announced field trials at commercial-scale operations (grower-investor Wish Farms) reached performance "on par with human harvesting," but there is no public evidence yet of general commercial availability beyond its investor-grower partner farms.
Best for: Large-scale Florida-style strawberry grower-shippers (the kind already invested in the company, e.g. Wish Farms, Naturipe, Driscoll's-aligned growers) facing a shrinking seasonal hand-picking workforce, who can work with Harvest CROO's service/lease model rather than buying hardware outright.| Fieldworker 1 Verified 2026-07-17 | B8 Harvester Verified 2026-07-19 | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Task | Harvesting | Harvesting |
| Autonomy | Fully autonomous | Fully autonomous |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom | United States |
| Availability | Pilot / limited | Pilot / limited |
| EU market | Pending | Pending |
| Lead time | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| Last verified | 2026-07-17 | 2026-07-19 |
| Specifications | ||
| Power source | Battery-electric (details not disclosed) | Diesel-electric hybrid self-propelled platform — most drive motors are electric, powered from an onboard diesel fuel supply (reported for the B5-generation platform; current B8 powertrain not restated in public materials, no evidence of a change) |
| Required tractor power | Not required (self-propelled between rows) | Not required (self-propelled platform, not tractor-pulled) |
| Dimensions | Not disclosed | Approx. 32 ft long x 18 ft wide (reported for the platform's commercial-prototype generation) |
| Weight | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| Min farm size | Not disclosed | Not disclosed (deployed to date with large commercial grower-shippers, e.g. Wish Farms' ~600-acre Florida operation) |
| Productivity | Designed to match human picker speed and quality; figures not published | Up to 8 acres/day in 20-hour shifts at full commercial scale — company states this replaces the work of 25-30+ hand pickers; picks a full 16-robot pass on a plant in roughly 8 seconds, indexing to the next plant in about 1.5 seconds |
| Max speed | Not disclosed | About 3 inches/second forward travel while picking |
| Sensors | AI-enhanced 3D cameras · spectral-frequency ripeness sensing · machine learning pick selection | 360-degree LiDAR for navigation/obstacle avoidance; dual GPS for sub-plant positioning; onboard stereo cameras and an AI/machine-vision system (recently upgraded to current-generation NVIDIA chips) to assess ripeness |
| Price & model | ||
| Price (EUR) | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| Native price | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| Business model | Harvesting-as-a-service (2-year programme with Place UK and Littywood Farm); no hardware list price | Harvesting-as-a-service — Harvest CROO leases the harvester and operates it for the grower (piece-rate-style pricing was described for an earlier generation), rather than selling the machine; no public list price found |
| Ongoing cost | Service contract terms not disclosed | Not disclosed — service/lease terms are negotiated directly with growers |
| Key outcome | ||
| Best verified result | Ripeness assessment Spectral-frequency sensing removes human bias from ripeness analysis · vendor | Harvest crew size for a given field One B8 Harvester (16 picking robots) covering up to 8 acres/day in a 20-hour shift · vendor |
| EU context | ||
| CE marking | No CE marking published — UK (UKCA regime) pilots; Portugal trials planned, EU placement not verified | Not applicable — no evidence of EU market placement; US-only operations found |
| Machinery Regulation | Not verified for EU market placement | Not applicable — not placed on the EU market |
| CAP subsidy | Not applicable — service not yet offered in the EU | Not applicable — US-based service, outside EU CAP |
"—" means the manufacturer has not disclosed the figure; we never estimate silently. Model either machine's payback with your own numbers on its ROI calculator page.