Revolutionary Essex robots up for national award

University of Essex robots which are transforming the way crops are being harvested have been nominated for a national award.

Essex’s Sustainable smArt Robotic Agriculture (SARA) project is one of three in the country running for the Best Research Project Industry Collaboration at the 2026 UKRI AI & Robotics Research Awards.

The shortlisting recognises the collaborative work taking place between Essex’s Professor Klaus McDonald Maier and Dr Vishwanathan Mohan, and industry partners Wilkin and Sons, JEPCO and GyroPlant.

The project harnesses the power of robotics and AI to automate repetitive, labour-intensive tasks in farms facing severe labour shortage, while increasing yield, minimizing wastage, carbon footprint and sustaining local production.

Key to the work has been the creation of deployable low-cost AgriRobotics, which can adapt to different environments, tasks and crop types.

Such has been the success of the project, Professor McDonald-Maeir and Dr Mohan have launched a spinout company, Versatile RobotX, which is helping to accelerate the commercialisation of their research and its global impact.

Professor McDonald-Maier, Head Robotics and Embedded Systems Research and Founding CEO, Versatile RobotX said: “Being shortlisted for the UKRI AI & Robotics Research Awards is strong validation of the impact we are delivering with Tiptree, JEPCO and GyroPlant.

“Our focus is practical field robotics that addresses critical societal challenges of ‘food security, labour security and climate/sustainability.”

Dr Mohan, Head AgriRobotics Laboratory and CTO, Versatile RobotX said: “This sustained industry collaboration has pioneered development affordable agrirobotics solutions that are easily adaptable to crop types, tasks, growing environments, while covering the whole spectrum of robotic ‘perception-action-decision making-learning-collaboration’ loop.”

The SARA project enjoyed success at last year’s UKRI AI & Robotics Research Awards, where it won the Best Demonstration category.

The robot designed to pick strawberries at Wilkin and Sons was showcased at the Robotics Runway segment at the Innovate UK Robotics Industry Showcase in early March.

The event was aligned with UKRI’s announcement of a £52 million set of competitions for Robotics Adoption Hubs, and we delivered a live, on-stage strawberry-harvesting demonstration.