[Agricultural Machinery in the Spotlight at KIEMSTA] Metafarmers’ ‘Omni Farmer’… A multi-tasking robot that harvests cucumbers unmanned for up to 10 hours at night

On the 4th, in one corner of the Future Agriculture Pavilion at Daegu EXCO, a robotic arm mounted on a white body slowly extended between cucumber vines. When the gripper at the end of the arm grabbed a fruit and cut its stem, the scissor lift below adjusted its height, and the machine moved along the rail to the next crop. It was “Omni Farmer,” a multi-tasking agricultural robot unveiled by agricultural robotics startup Metafarmers (CEO Lee Gyu-hwa) at the 2026 Korea International Exhibition of Machinery, Equipment, Science and Technology for Agriculture (KIEMSTA), which opened that day and ran until the 7th. Visitors held up their mobile phones and watched the robot move.

The job the robot is trying to take over is harvesting, one of the least mechanized agricultural tasks. According to the Rural Development Administration’s survey on the mechanization rate of agricultural work, the mechanization rate for field crops stood at 67.0% as of 2023. While plowing and land preparation (100.0%) and pest control (96.2%) have been almost fully mechanized, harvesting remains at only 42.9%. Although these are statistics for open-field crops, the same difficulty applies to harvesting greenhouse fruit vegetables, where each fruit differs in size, ripeness and position.

At this exhibition, Metafarmers organized its display under the theme of a “Physical AI Smart Farm.” The idea is to show a farm where robots handle repetitive agricultural tasks and people focus on decision-making. In a phone interview with this newspaper on the 5th, CEO Lee Gyu-hwa said, “You can think of it as realizing a farm that needs no labor,” adding, “We presented a futuristic farm where a pest-control robot autonomously drives and sprays, while the multi-tasking robot Omni Farmer harvests alongside it.”
 

Robotic arm, lift, autonomous driving and even a loading compartment

The Omni Farmer on display is a prototype, but it is scheduled to be sold to farms in this exact form. The machine consists of a harvesting robotic arm, an autonomous driving platform and a lift. It moves between crops along pipe rails on the greenhouse floor, and travels autonomously between aisles. It was designed to operate even in narrow passageways.

The loading compartment for harvested crops holds four container boxes (conti boxes). CEO Lee explained, “The crops are placed into the four boxes in sequence, and when they are full, the filled boxes are removed at an outside station and empty boxes are put back in.” The station was not shown in this exhibition.

Recognizing crops is handled by an RGB-D vision sensor, which reads both color and distance (depth), together with AI. Sensor data is used to read the fruit’s size and location as well as pest and disease information, while AI determines ripeness, decides whether to harvest and plans routes that avoid obstacles. At the end of the robotic arm is a “task-specific specialized gripper” that can be swapped according to the crop and task. The company plans to perform harvesting, artificial pollination, sorting and scouting by changing only the gripper and AI model on the same machine, and also to add functions for flower thinning, fruit thinning and leaf removal. Applicable crops include strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes and apples, with paprika to be supported later. Among them, cucumbers are the first target for commercialization.

Unmanned harvesting for up to 10 hours even at night

Omni Farmer’s strength is that it can continue working even during hours when people are not working. According to the company, Omni Farmer is designed to enable unmanned harvesting for up to 10 hours even at night and in the early morning. In other words, it can fill the gap at times when it is difficult to secure labor, such as when people are resting. CEO Lee said, “It is a machine that can work in place of people even at night.” He estimated its labor replacement effect at about 1.5 workers.

Field demonstrations are continuing in the company’s greenhouse at the demonstration complex of the Smart Farm Innovation Valley in Sangju, North Gyeongsang Province. Metafarmers is testing the robot while growing cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and strawberries in a greenhouse of 145 pyeong (about 479㎡). CEO Lee said, “It is scheduled to be deployed in actual commercial greenhouses from the end of the year to early next year.” In addition, the company has conducted demonstrations of harvesting, pollination and scouting at a cucumber farm in Boryeong, South Chungcheong Province; a strawberry greenhouse in Seosan; an apple farm in Geochang, South Gyeongsang Province; Yangpyeong Agricultural Cooperative in Gyeonggi Province; and a vertical farm in Dongtan, Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province.
 

 Started in a Seoul National University lab… CES Innovation Award and Edison Awards Gold

Metafarmers was established in September 2022 as a spin-off from the Innovative Design and Integrated Manufacturing Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Seoul National University. In July 2025, it attracted a Pre-A investment worth 3 billion won, and received the CES 2025 Innovation Award in the Food & AgTech category and the Gold Award in the Smart Agriculture and Sustainability category at the Edison Awards 2025. In April this year, it was selected as an excellent smart agriculture company by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. It holds four patents related to mobile robots and end effectors for crop harvesting, and has received a technology transfer from the Rural Development Administration for a “fruit growth monitoring device for crop harvesting and its operating method.”

The company presents as its next goal a “Closed Loop” smart farm that uses growth data collected by robots during harvesting for yield prediction and quality management. Whereas existing smart farms have focused on environmental data, the idea is to enable the farm to learn on its own using growth data collected as robots move among crops, while the farm owner makes decisions based on a single report.

Meanwhile, Metafarmers explained that the work is being carried out with support from the Smart Farm Multi-Ministry Package Innovation Technology Development Project, “Development and Demonstration of Intelligent Agricultural Work Robots and Control Systems Tailored to Fruit Vegetables” (RS-2025-02219411), by the Korea Planning and Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology in Food, Agriculture and Forestry and the Smart Farm R&D Foundation, with funding from the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Rural Development Administration.
It added that commercialization of this achievement in particular is being pursued with support from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and the Korea Agriculture Technology Promotion Agency’s rapid commercialization support project for AI-applied products in the agri-food sector, “Physical AI-based agricultural work automation robot ‘Omni Farmer.’”