Agri-OpenCore: Successful Deployment Trial at Annabel’s Deliciously British
Revolutionising Robot Deployment in Strawberry Farms
The Agri-OpenCore (AOC) project team recently completed a successful deployment trial at Annabel’s Deliciously British, a premium strawberry farm in Yorkshire. This real-world test demonstrated the capabilities of our innovative AOC deployment software stack, designed to streamline the introduction of robotic solutions in agricultural environments.
The AOC Deployment Solution
Our team has developed a groundbreaking cloud-based Topological Map Editor that dramatically accelerates the creation of farm layouts for robot deployment.
The technology automatically generates a prototypical robot “roadmap” of strawberry farms, capturing the complex structure of hectares of farmland. This initial mapping is followed by on-ground calibration from robots to refine the positioning of navigable routes.
The theoretical foundation of this approach was established in our publication “A Unified Topological Representation for Robotic Fleets in Agricultural Applications”, which introduces the fundamental concept of using topological representations to model farm environments.
Field Trial Success
The trial at Annabel’s Deliciously British on 2 May 2025 proved the real-world applicability of our deployment solution, with the entire mapping process completed in less than an hour. This achievement meets our targeted deployment time, representing a significant advancement in the speed and efficiency of deploying robotic systems into real-world agricultural settings.
The system generated deployment-ready maps with navigable nodes and edges, providing a comprehensive topological representation of the farm environment.
Collaborative Innovation
This successful trial is the result of close collaboration between the University of Lincoln and Dogtooth Technologies, one of the industrial partners in the AOC project. Dogtooth Technologies has been developing commercial robotic harvesting solutions since 2016, and their expertise in strawberry harvesting robots complemented our mapping and deployment technologies perfectly.
The AOC project, funded by Innovate UK (Project number: 10041179) as part of the DEFRA “Farming Innovation Programme – large R&D partnership projects”, aims to:
- Cut the time and cost to develop robotic harvesting systems for farms
- Create human-cost-picking-parity performance
- Leave a legacy to accelerate development of agri-robotic systems for all crops
Broader Validation
The system has now been validated at two previously unseen sites, confirming its flexibility and efficiency for diverse agricultural environments. This demonstrates the potential of the technology to be applied across different farm layouts and conditions, making it a versatile solution for the agricultural sector.
Looking Forward
The successful field trial at Annabel’s Deliciously British marks an important milestone in the AOC project’s mission to create the world’s first open development platform for agri-robotic crop harvesting. By providing open access to core software and interfaces that were previously unavailable to SMEs, the project is democratising access to advanced agricultural technology and fostering innovation across the sector. We’ll be back at Annabel’s in due course to complete robotic endurance and reliability trials.
This collaborative approach between academia and industry is creating an enduring legacy that will be available for any robotic company and farming system, ultimately contributing to a more efficient, sustainable and productive agricultural future.
For more information about the Agri-OpenCore project, visit agri-opencore.org
To learn more about our partners: