Towards Autonomous Strawberry Pollination via IoT and Robotics

Abstract

Strawberries, a high-value crop with growing demand, face increasing challenges due to labour shortages, declining natural pollinator populations, and inconsistent manual pollination. To address these obstacles, this paper introduces an IoT-enabled robotic system designed to automate strawberry pollination with minimal human intervention. The system consists of a mobile rover with a three-dimensional robotic arm for precise flower detection and positioning, and a high-performance server to handle image processing and task coordination. The rover uses an event-driven software architecture that enables responsive, real-time behaviour and keeps power and memory usage to a minimum, which is crucial to field-deployable robotics. The onboard camera modules capture images of the strawberry bed and send them to an image processing server, which returns flower coordinates. The arm then performs targeted pollination based on the flower positions. Communication between system components is asynchronous and modular to allow scalable integration and future system extensions. Preliminary field tests conducted in open-field raised beds demonstrate the system's functional viability and reliable operational behaviour under real-world conditions. Designed with affordability and practicality in mind, this work contributes a novel and cost-effective approach to precision agriculture, particularly for small and medium farms where traditional pollination methods are either unreliable, labour-intensive, or too costly to sustain.