The Challenge: find a problem in the world and solve it using a robot whose form is well-informed by its function. BU Robotics Club’s answer: AgroBot, an autonomous tomato-picking robot.
Last week, at the Robotics Summit & Expo — an annual event that brings together 5,000+ developers focused on building robots for aerospace and defense, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing and other markets — the BU Robotics Club brought home both the First Prize and Audience Choice Award in the 4th Form & Function Robotics Challenge. The First Prize Award came with $10,000 in seed money, and the Audience Choice Award came with an additional $1,000.
This was the BU Robotics Club’s first time ever entering the competition.
In the fall of 2025, Kaedin Kurtz, now a recent Master’s graduate in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, approached Dakota Winslow, now a recent Master’s graduate in Electrical Engineering, about starting a robotics club at BU. Kurtz became President, and Winslow became Vice President.
“For the fall semester, it was just four of us, myself, Kaedin, and the two other Master’s students, Abby Smith and Chaeson Sears,” Winslow said. “The four of us put our heads together and said, ‘What can we do to try and get some more robotics in our lives here?’”
During the fall semester, the team began a couple of independent projects, such as a small robotic arm and a robotics exo-glove. The team based its projects in the Robotics & Autonomous Systems Teaching and Innovation Center (RASTIC), a “build-teach-learn” workspace that opened in March 2024 and has since become a hub for robotics innovation among students.
“Just after winter break, we decided that we wanted to do the Mass Robotics Form & Function Challenge, which Kaedin had participated in on his own the year before, but we wanted to bring the force of an entire club to it,” Winslow said.
The four members of the BU Robotics Club printed out posters, canvassed classes, and reached out to other students in the Robotics and Autonomous Systems program, and the undergraduate Mechanical and Electrical Engineering programs. This spring, the club attracted 40 members, 15 of whom formed the competition team, according to Winslow.
The team developed the concept for AgroBot, a tomato-picking robot. “Tomatoes seem silly, but they are sort of perfectly set up to be addressed with robotics,” Winslow said.
According to Winslow, tomatoes are resistant to traditional mechanical harvesting techniques. Tomatoes will be smashed if you shake a bush and wait for the tomatoes to fall off, and running over a tomato bush with a combine harvester will shred them. Thus, tomatoes must be plucked from their vines delicately and carefully, which seemed like the perfect opportunity to use a robotic arm.
In the Americas, tomatoes tend to be grown in hot houses, which have a controlled environment and where the plants are neatly lined up in long rows with tracks running next to the rows for workers to push carts down, according to Winslow.
“The AgroBot can attach to those rails, slide up and down in a greenhouse, and pick tomatoes in the same way that a human would,” Winslow said. “It sees the tomatoes with its camera, and uses a stereoscopic vision to know where the tomato is in space, reaches out its arm, grabs it, and puts them away.”
The physical form of the robot is a robotic arm. Similar to a human arm, it has a shoulder, an elbow, and a wrist, allowing it to move in the same ways that a human arm can. Attached to the wrist is a three-fingered gripper that can open and close, and the teeth of that gripper are made of a soft material that collapses. As it reaches and grabs a tomato, it uses soft hands to gently cradle the tomato, plucking it up from the vine and placing it into a box.
“Agriculture robots are just a growing field at the moment, at a time when agricultural workers are in shorter supply than ever,” Winslow said. “The need for small-scale robotic farming across the country, rather than giant-scale robotic or human farming in just a couple of places, is becoming more and more relevant. We thought this would be a good thing for us to try and tackle.”
AgroBot, and the BU Robotics Team as a whole, “really resonated with the audience,” according to Dr. Kenneth Sebesta (ME), a Senior Lecturer and Director of RASTIC.
“They built an incredible robot from scratch in just over 10 weeks, but also they came together as a team,” Dr. Sebesta said. “They also looked like a team — they were all wearing coveralls with the BU logo, the RASTIC logo, and their team’s logo ironed on.”
RASTIC played a significant role in the team’s success. Not only did they use the space to develop AgroBot, but it served as the space where the team developed their robotics skills.
“Nearly everything I’ve learned about [robotics], I and my colleagues learned here in RASTIC,” Winslow said. “Some of the things we learned in our coursework, but most of them we’ve learned just by building and working with robots, the vast majority of which happens in RASTIC.”
According to Dr. Sebesta, the initial goal of RASTIC was to create a space where this kind of innovation was possible.
“This never has existed before at any university: where students could build their own robots, but supported by the same industry as the faculty are,” Dr. Sebesta said. “They have a space that they can create in and learn hands-on applied robotics, complementing their theoretical skills. This is, in theory, a very powerful combination, and now we have the very visceral confirmation from the world.”