Imitation Machines: Flexible robotics for variable agrifood tasks
Opportunity for
- Agrifood producers, packers and processors (horticulture, fresh produce, grains) who want to trial flexible robotics on variable, repetitive tasks
- Supply-chain and logistics operators (packing sheds, cool stores, distribution centres) looking to de-risk automation
- Industry partners and field trialists willing to host on-farm or in-facility pilots
- Research organisations interested in joint projects on human-robot collaboration and learning-from-demonstration
- Investors who want early exposure to scalable, real-world robotics technology
Opportunity description
Industry challenge
Agrifood is one of Australia’s largest and most critical industries, with agriculture, fisheries and forestry production forecast to exceed $100 billion in 2025–26 and food manufacturing turnover around $173 billion. Yet many packing sheds, processing plants and supply-chain operations still rely on manual labour for picking, packing and handling because automation is too rigid and expensive to reconfigure.
Labour shortages and rising wage costs, particularly in horticulture and regional areas, are now a strategic constraint on growth and export competitiveness.
The priority challenge we address is variable, short-run work: tasks that change daily or seasonally (different SKUs, pack formats, product presentation) where traditional robot programming and repeated integration make automation uneconomic. We aim to unlock flexible automation for fresh produce handling, food packaging, on-farm and near-farm processing, and cold-chain logistics, areas where human dexterity and judgement are still essential, but where repetitive motion and labour intensity are high.
Current opportunity
We are offering selected agrifood partners a free, no-cost pilot of Imitation Machines’ robot training platform in a live operational environment.
We are looking for organisations willing to host a pilot on one or more simple but variable tasks (for example, picking and placing, packing, loading/unloading, sorting or presentation tasks). Partners are invited to submit an expression of interest via growᴬᴳ outlining their operation and candidate use cases.
In return, we will provide our software licence for the pilot period, on-site support from our team to integrate with existing robot or cobot hardware (or to help specify suitable low-cost hardware), and collaborative experiment design to measure productivity, labour and flexibility outcomes.
Pilots are structured to minimise disruption and internal effort: we work around existing operations and ask mainly for access, feedback and a nominated operational “champion”. Partners will gain early access to new capability, evidence to inform future automation investment decisions, and the opportunity to co-shape a technology designed specifically for variable agrifood work.
Enquire now or find Imitation Machines at the Cluster Connect exhibition booth at evokeAG in Melbourne, 17-18 February.
Industry background
Imitation Machines is an Australian robotics software company focused on “learning from demonstration” for industrial robots and cobots. Instead of writing code or commissioning large integration projects, operators physically guide a robot through a task; the system generalises from a small number of examples so the robot can perform the task on its own, including across natural variation in products and presentation.
In internal lab and proof-of-concept work, we have demonstrated reductions in robot training time from roughly 10 days of traditional programming to around 3 hours of demonstration-based training for comparable tasks.
Our platform is industry-agnostic but is being tailored for agrifood environments: variable products, changing SKUs, seasonal workflows and tight margins. Key benefits for users are faster deployment, easier retraining as tasks change, and reduced dependence on scarce specialist engineers. Our point of difference is a focus on physical demonstration by front-line staff, rather than coding by experts, to make flexible robotics practical for SMEs and regional operators, not just large, highly automated plants.
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