- Robot mimics human hand movements to harvest delicate tea buds
- Technology targets labor shortages in China’s premium tea industry
A tea-picking robot developed by the Chinese agricultural scientists drew attention at the eighth China International Tea Expo in Hangzhou this week, as China pushes automation into one of its most labor-intensive agricultural industries.
The machine, developed by researchers at the Tea Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, demonstrated autonomous harvesting in the tea hills of Longwu, about 15 kilometers from downtown Hangzhou, during the May 21-25 exhibition.
Using a visual recognition system, the robot identified tender tea shoots before a robotic arm replicated the traditional “pinch-and-pluck” motion used by skilled tea pickers.
The robot combines what developers described as “stepped conveyor recovery technology” and a low-damage cutting system designed to preserve leaf integrity.
Liu Haoyang, a research fellow at the research institute, said the machine was developed to address the industry problem that “good tea is hard to pick.”
According to the institute, the robot achieves fresh leaf integrity rates above 90%.
Its AI system was trained on more than 200,000 tea leaf images using deep-learning algorithms, allowing it to identify premium-grade buds such as “one bud with one leaf” and “one bud with two leaves” with roughly 90% accuracy.
The robot uses binocular cameras for three-dimensional positioning. Once a bud’s coordinates are identified, a biomimetic picking mechanism imitates the twisting and pinching motion of human fingers to detach the shoot.
Equipped with two robotic arms, the prototype harvested about 3,500 buds per hour during field tests conducted in Hangzhou tea plantations in April 2026, according to previous media reports.
Developers said the machine’s harvesting success rate reached 80%, with one unit roughly equivalent to one experienced tea picker.
The robot can also operate around the clock and in rainy or nighttime conditions, though it is currently limited to flat or gently sloped tea fields with gradients below 15 degrees.
China is the world’s largest tea producer, but harvesting premium tea varieties still relies heavily on manual labor. Aging workers and labor shortages have increasingly become bottlenecks for the industry.
The prototype displayed at the expo remains in the technical validation stage and still requires further refinement before large-scale commercial deployment, the institute said.
