How Polybot teaches machines to pick tomatoes by showing them the motion

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Polybot, a Tubingen startup spun out of the ELLIS Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, is building a fully autonomous truss tomato harvester that learns the job end to end from human demonstrations rather than hand written rules. It picked its first tomato on its own in May 2025 and was harvesting full greenhouse rows by December. A full pilot runs in summer 2026, with the first systems due to growers in early 2027.

Picking a truss of tomatoes is still a human job. The fruit is soft, half hidden by leaves, and no two plants grow the same.

Polybot, a startup out of Tubingen in Germany, wants to hand that job to a robot.

Most farm robots are programmed. Engineers write the rules for what a ripe tomato looks like and where the stem gets cut.

Polybot writes none of that. It shows the robot the movement instead, again and again, and lets it work out what matters.

Co-founder Martin Kiefel says they only show it the motion being performed, and never describe the tomato itself.

Given enough demonstrations, red fruit keeps turning up at the moment of the cut, so red starts to matter.

It is the learning approach behind today’s humanoid robots, pointed at a greenhouse.

It has moved quickly. First tomato picked on its own in May 2025, full rows by December, the arms riding the trolley rails growers already have.

Speed is roughly human today. The target is one and a half times that, plus the jobs around picking: de-leafing, winding and tying.

A full pilot this summer, first systems in 2027.

And the bigger bet: make delicate work cheap to automate, and farms can grow mixed crops again.

a month ago

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How Polybot teaches machines to pick tomatoes by showing them the motion

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