Robots Among the Vines: How Grand Cru Wine Became a Testbed for Agricultural Robotics

Nothing in agriculture is more jealously traditional than a great vineyard. So it says something that Chateau Angelus, one of Saint-Emilion's most celebrated estates, has let a robot loose between its vines. The machine is called Ted, an electric straddle robot built by Naio Technologies of Toulouse that rolls over the rows, guided by lidar, cameras and GPS, mechanically weeding the soil without a drop of herbicide. Naio, founded in 2011 by two robotics engineers, now reports around 450 of its machines working farms in France and beyond, and says it has moved to mass production.

Why wine got robots first

Vineyards are, it turns out, nearly ideal robot country. The crop is high-value, so the economics forgive expensive machines. The vines stand in neat, permanent rows that simplify navigation. And the pressure is enormous from both directions: seasonal labour is scarcer and dearer every year, with analysts citing labour cost reductions of up to 35 percent as the main driver of adoption, while regulators and consumers push growers to abandon chemical weedkillers. A robot that weeds mechanically answers both problems in one pass. Market researchers project more than 28,000 vineyard robots in operation worldwide in 2026, with Europe accounting for over 60 percent of installations.

The industry's giants have noticed. Yamaha Agriculture reportedly expanded its autonomous Prospr platform this June with a precision weed-control attachment developed with Croplands, adding herbicide application to a machine already spraying orchards and vineyards. At the extreme end, precision systems using micro-dosing are reported to cut chemical use by up to 99 percent compared to blanket spraying. Japan's Yanmar, meanwhile, built its YV01 spraying robot explicitly to take over the most dangerous task in the vineyard: applying treatments on steep slopes where tractors overturn and humans breathe the drift.

Terroir versus technology, a false duel

Purists worry that machines will strip wine of its soul. The vignerons using them argue the opposite: every hour not spent driving a tractor is an hour spent tasting, pruning and walking the rows, and soil freed from herbicide is precisely what the terroir doctrine demands. The robot, in this telling, is not replacing the winemaker's judgment; it is buying it time.

Our take: the vineyard is doing for agricultural robotics what the warehouse did for logistics robots, providing a structured, high-value environment where the technology can mature before spreading to messier fields. That the proving ground happens to produce Saint-Emilion is a very French irony. The robots are not coming for the wine; they are coming for the weeds, and the wine may be better for it.