Tokuiten, a Nagoya-based agricultural automation company that also grows organic cherry tomatoes, announced on 1 June 2026 that on 25 May it had completed the trial phase of its in-house suction-type cherry tomato harvesting robot at its own farm in Chita, Aichi Prefecture, and moved to a production setup in which cultivation staff run the robot as part of their daily work. The company describes this as an advanced example in Japan of a harvesting robot operated continuously by growing staff in a real field.
Tokuiten began developing the current suction-type robot in 2023 and spent about three years testing and improving it, running farm tests twice a week. In April 2026 a single robot achieved automatic harvesting of 31 kg of cherry tomatoes in one day, and in internal evaluation the robot-picked fruit matched the quality of hand-picked fruit and is shipped as normal.
The robot runs from Tuesday and Thursday evenings, the day before regular harvest days. After staff start it at the end of their shift, it patrols the farm aisles automatically for about five hours and picks tomatoes that have reached the right stage; the next morning staff collect the fruit for sorting and shipping. Each run harvests roughly half of what one human picker does. AI judges the ripeness of each fruit from camera images, and a weak suction force separates the fruit at the calyx without damaging it, a mechanism for which Tokuiten holds a patent. The robot travels on rails laid between the rows and uses omnidirectional wheels to move between rails.
Tokuiten is now seeking partners with large cherry tomato farms for joint trials. Under a Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries SBIR project it is building a new 1 ha farm in Chita, due for completion in March 2027, where it plans to introduce six harvesting robots and work on multi-robot coordination, maintainability and fault tolerance.
Details
- City
- Chita
- Organization
- Tokuiten
- Continent
- Asia
- Country
- Japan