![Abundant Robotics](pic/abundant-robotics-applewall.jpg)
Abundant Robotics’ apple-picking robot.
Abundant
Robotics, a Hayward, Calif.-based
agricultural robotics company founded in 2016, has shut down.
According
to a memo about Abundant’s liquidation obtained by The Robot Report,
the company
“was unable to develop the market traction necessary to
support its business during the pandemic.”
On June
29, 2021, Abundant put up for sale all of
its intellectual property and
assets.
Abundant said it has a “host of IP, including a large body of vacuum manipulation patents (and
patent applications),
a patented sensory system to allow the vacuum to
navigate obstruction, a patented world-class vision system for
identifying fruits and their quality,
and several software patents for
the machine’s automated operations (including a solution to solve for
“doubles” that enables the machine to pick multiple fruit at once.”
You can
read the liquidation
memo here to learn more about the available
assets and the market opportunity.
Abundant also failed to raise another round of funding.
It raised a
total of $12 million, according to Crunchbase,
but its $10 million
Series A closed back in May 2017.
It raised a $2 million Seed Round from SRI Ventures
in 2016.
Abundant
developed a harvesting robot that initially targeted apples.
The system combined computer vision and a vacuum end-effector to select
and pick ripe fruit, transferring it into a bin.
The company estimated its machine could reach between 50-90% of fruit
on trees.
The system is designed to augment human labor and could allegedly pick
apples every two seconds.
Abundant said it was targeting a pick rate of 1.5 seconds for the
commercialized version of the robot.
The company planned to broaden the type of fruit it picked in the
future.
According
to the memo, Abundant partnered with one of New Zealand’s largest apple
growers, T&G Global,
to test the apple harvesting robot in
small-scale commercial trials.
Abundant said it also conducted similar
small-scale trials in the U.S with multiple customers.
According to the memo, the market for orchard fruit production is about
$200 billion, about $40-60 billion of which is specific to apple
production.
Abundant
said some of its competitors
include FFRobotics (Israel), Ripe
Robotics (Australia) and Tevel (Israel).
Tevel
won a 2021 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award, produced by our sister
publication Robotics Business Review,
for its tethered drone that uses vision and an attached robotic arm and
gripper to pick ripe fruit.