10092145ORTUSClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKDogtooth has developed five generations of its strawberry picking robot and uses 60 third- and fourth-generation robots for commercial picking in the UK and overseas. This year, we will pick 50 tonnes of fruit by robot (including e.g. 5% of Dyson Farming's strawberry output), and we expect to pick 200 tonnes in 2024\. Dogtooth is, today, already within an order of magnitude of a point where we can address the UK's shortfall in picking labour - and no competitor comes close. This project will allow us to improve the scalability of our offering to the point where we can largely address the UKs present 20% harvest labour shortfall within three years and ultimately drive significant sales growth in the UK and overseas. Dogtooth's robotic picking solution will provide growers with a predictable means of harvest, eliminating a key fear-factor preventing growers from investing in productivity enhancements more generally. Robotic picking brings significant benefits in terms of environmental impact. Not only because predictable harvesting capacity reduces food waste (the UK wasted £35M of soft fruit in 2021 due purely to failure to recruit harvest labour, British Berry Growers) but also because the increasingly long flights by migrant agricultural workers (in 2023, the majority were recruited from beyond the EU) explain an increasing proportion (\>10%) of the embedded CO2 in soft fruit. This project will directly benefit UK soft growers by eliminating barriers to widespread adoption of robotic fruit picking, thereby reducing their dependency on increasingly difficult-to-recruit migrant labour and eliminating an existential business risk. Furthermore, robotic picking will generate benefits in terms of quality, due to innovations such as the ability to pick overnight (when cooler temperatures increase shelf life) and to use robot-provided data to predict yield (increasing supply chain efficiency by allowing growers to make better contracts with their own supermarket customers).