Helinet
Robotic systems for Mediterranean agriculture
Helinet designs and builds autonomous robotic systems for the orchards, fields and farms of the Mediterranean. Our current focus is the Olive Picker — a bench-top R&D platform for autonomous olive harvesting, targeting small and mid-sized Greek farms.
The same hardware-and-software stack — perception, control, motion, edge AI and safety — is deliberately architected to extend to tree-fruit and soft-fruit harvesting, weeding, and precision spraying.
Current focus — PoMVa
PoMVa is Helinet's autonomous olive-harvesting platform — a field-deployable robotic vehicle now in fabrication, with first field trials scheduled for autumn 2026 at our own olive grove in the Peloponnese.
The machine combines two subsystems: a self-deploying net-collection system that screws its own stakes and lays the catch net around each tree, and a vision-guided robotic arm being developed to detect fruit-bearing branches and harvest them branch-by-branch without damaging the tree. During the 2026–27 season, the platform will harvest under teleoperation while recording a full perception and control dataset — the training corpus for autonomous operation in the seasons that follow.
PoMVa targets the underserved 5–50 stremmata cohort: too large for handheld harvesters, too small for industrial trunk shakers.
The road to autonomy
PoMVa is designed to take over the harvest step by step — each season doing more of the work itself:
- 2026 Netting, automated. The machine screws its stakes and lays the catch net on its own; harvesting is done by hand onto the net.
- 2026–27 season Harvesting, teleoperated. A vision-equipped arm rods the branches under human control, while the platform records everything it sees and does.
- 2027+ Harvesting, autonomous. Trained on real seasons of Greek olive harvesting, PoMVa detects fruit-bearing branches and harvests them branch-by-branch — without damaging the tree, and without an operator. Netting, rodding, collection and moving tree-to-tree: the full cycle, handled by the machine.
Every stage ships as an upgrade to the same platform — the vehicle a farmer buys for netting is the vehicle that later harvests on its own.
A platform, not a one-off
The Olive Picker is the first product on a deliberately reusable agri-robotics stack:
- Perception RGB-D vision, depth sensing, real-time scene understanding
- Motion six-axis arms with swappable end-effectors over a standard mechanical and electrical interface
- Control ROS 2-based, designed for outdoor field deployment
- Edge AI detection and decision-making running locally on-device
- Safety fail-safe E-stop architecture, watchdogs for autonomous operation
The next applications on the roadmap: tree-fruit harvesting (cherries, apples, pistachios), soft-fruit harvesting (tomatoes, strawberries), autonomous weeding, and precision spraying.
Built on deployment experience
Helinet (formerly Teledrom Hellas) brings years of experience installing, commissioning, automating and training telecommunications and IT networks. We apply the same deployment know-how — taking complex systems from bench to operational field — to agricultural robotics.
Get in touch
We work with farmers, cooperatives, research institutions and industrial partners interested in the future of Mediterranean agriculture.