Pickerbot vs Pickerbot Mini vs Pickerbot Plus vs Pickerbot Pro: What’s the Difference?
If you are looking for a great mobile robot that can do more than simply move from point A to point B, the Pickerbot family offers an interesting combination of autonomous mobility, robotic manipulation, computer vision and ROS-based development.
Rather than functioning solely as an Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR), a Pickerbot combines a mobile platform with a robotic arm, sensors and onboard computing. This allows the robot to navigate an environment, identify objects and physically interact with them.
Over the development of the platform, several Pickerbot configurations have appeared, including Pickerbot, Pickerbot Mini, Pickerbot Plus and Pickerbot Pro.
So, what's the difference?
The simplest explanation is that the different Pickerbot models have been designed around different combinations of size, mobility, manipulation capability and application. The compact Pickerbot Mini provides an accessible platform for education and research, while the larger Pickerbot Pro provides substantially greater manipulation capabilities for advanced R&D and commercial prototyping. Earlier Pickerbot and Pickerbot Plus configurations helped establish the platform's roots in applications such as agriculture and autonomous harvesting.
Here is a closer look at the Pickerbot family.
What Is a Pickerbot?
A Pickerbot is a mobile manipulation robot.
Mobile manipulation combines two major areas of robotics:
Autonomous mobile robotics enables a robot to navigate around an environment.
Robotic manipulation enables it to interact physically with objects using an arm and gripper.
Put the two together and you have a robot capable of travelling to an object, identifying it, picking it up and potentially transporting or placing it somewhere else.
That makes Pickerbot platforms useful for research into areas including:
Autonomous navigation
Pick-and-place robotics
Artificial intelligence
Computer vision
SLAM
Object recognition
Motion planning
Human-robot interaction
Agricultural robotics
Advanced manufacturing
Logistics
Service robotics
The original concept has particularly strong links to agriculture. Pickerbot technology was developed for applications such as identifying and picking produce, including delicate fruit, while later platforms have expanded the concept into indoor manufacturing, research and other mobile manipulation applications.
Pickerbot Mini: Compact and Accessible
The Pickerbot Mini is the compact member of the Pickerbot family and one of the easiest places to start if your goal is robotics education, ROS development or mobile manipulation research.
Despite the "Mini" name, this is much more than a basic mobile robot.
Pickerbot Mini integrates a robotic arm and gripper with an omnidirectional mobile chassis, LiDAR, cameras, an STM32 controller and an NVIDIA Jetson computer.
Current versions are available with Jetson Orin Nano or Jetson Orin NX controllers.
The platform also uses ROS 2 Humble, giving developers access to the enormous ROS ecosystem for navigation, perception, mapping and robotics development.
What is Pickerbot Mini best for?
Pickerbot Mini is particularly suitable for:
Universities and education: Students can learn ROS 2, SLAM, navigation, computer vision and manipulation using a physical platform rather than simulations alone.
Robotics research: Researchers can develop algorithms for autonomous navigation, object recognition and mobile manipulation.
AI development: NVIDIA Jetson computing provides the processing capability needed to experiment with machine learning and computer vision.
Proof-of-concept development: Companies can use the platform to explore mobile manipulation without immediately investing in a much larger robot.
Its compact dimensions also make Pickerbot Mini particularly convenient in laboratories, classrooms and other indoor environments where space may be limited.
Pickerbot Mini Specifications
Current Pickerbot Mini specifications illustrate just how much technology can be packaged into a relatively small mobile robot.
The robot measures approximately 460 × 533 × 516 mm, weighs around 12.6 kg and uses 100 mm mecanum wheels.
Its mobile base can carry a payload of approximately 15 kg, while its omnidirectional drive system enables the robot to move forwards, backwards, sideways and diagonally.
That manoeuvrability can be extremely valuable when experimenting in confined indoor environments.
Pickerbot Mini also incorporates LiDAR, an RGB camera and an Orbbec Astra depth camera. Depth sensing opens up applications involving 3D perception, point clouds, object recognition and interaction with the environment.
Battery life can reach approximately 6.5 hours without load or around 5.5 hours with a 3 kg load, depending on operating conditions.
Pickerbot Pro: The Professional Mobile Manipulation Platform
If Pickerbot Mini is designed to make mobile manipulation accessible, Pickerbot Pro takes the concept significantly further.
Pickerbot Pro is intended for serious robotics R&D, rapid prototyping and advanced mobile manipulation projects.
One of its most significant differences is its robotic arm.
The current Pickerbot Pro incorporates the Unitree Z1 Pro robotic arm, a six-degree-of-freedom manipulator offering approximately 740 mm of reach and a 3 kg arm payload.
The Z1 Pro also provides capabilities including force feedback and collision detection.
This makes Pickerbot Pro suitable for much more sophisticated manipulation experiments.
The robot combines this arm with an omnidirectional mecanum-wheel mobile base, LiDAR, depth camera, STM32 motor/power/IMU control and NVIDIA Jetson Orin computing.
What Is Pickerbot Pro Best For?
Pickerbot Pro is particularly well suited to:
Advanced manufacturing: A mobile manipulator can travel between work areas and interact with components, equipment and other objects.
Research and development: The combination of a capable arm, autonomous base and ROS 2 provides researchers with a platform for developing complex robotic systems.
Rapid prototyping: Instead of engineering an AMR, robotic arm, sensing system and onboard computer separately, developers have an integrated starting point.
Computer vision: Depth sensing and NVIDIA Jetson processing make the platform suitable for experimenting with visual recognition and AI.
Mobile manipulation: This is where Pickerbot Pro really stands out. Developers can investigate tasks requiring navigation and manipulation to work together.
Other potential research areas include inspection, service robotics, human-robot interaction, logistics, autonomous driving and edge computing.
Pickerbot Plus: The Agriculture-Focused Pickerbot
Pickerbot Plus is closely associated with the agricultural roots of the Pickerbot project.
One of the most interesting challenges in agricultural automation is that picking fruit is far more complicated than simply moving a robotic gripper from one predefined coordinate to another.
A robot may need to autonomously navigate between crops, use cameras and computer vision to locate fruit, determine whether it is ready to harvest, calculate its position and then manipulate it without damaging either the fruit or plant.
Pickerbot Plus was developed around this type of application.
The platform has been used for greenhouse automation and fruit-harvesting applications involving crops such as tomatoes and capsicums.
This illustrates an important difference between Pickerbot Plus and platforms such as Pickerbot Mini.
Whereas Mini makes an excellent general-purpose education and research platform, Pickerbot Plus represents the development of Pickerbot technology toward more application-specific autonomous manipulation in agriculture.
What About the Original Pickerbot?
The original Pickerbot established the concept behind the family: combine a mobile robotic platform, articulated arm, machine vision and autonomous navigation to create a robot capable of interacting intelligently with its environment.
Agriculture was an important early application.
Picking something as delicate as a tomato is a surprisingly difficult robotics problem. The robot has to locate the target, correctly position itself, control its manipulator and interact with the object without causing unnecessary damage.
The Pickerbot concept therefore demonstrates why mobile manipulation is such an important field.
The same underlying principles can be applied well beyond agriculture.
A robot that can autonomously navigate to an object and manipulate it could potentially be developed for manufacturing, logistics, laboratories, inspection, maintenance and service applications.
Pickerbot Mini vs Pickerbot Pro
For many customers today, the most relevant decision will be between Pickerbot Mini and Pickerbot Pro.
The biggest difference is scale and manipulation capability.
Choose Pickerbot Mini when: you need a compact and comparatively affordable ROS 2 mobile manipulation platform for education, AI development, research and experimentation.
Choose Pickerbot Pro when: you need a larger and more capable research platform with a professional six-axis Unitree Z1 Pro arm, greater reach and more advanced manipulation capability.
Both provide a foundation for autonomous navigation, ROS development and computer vision, but Pickerbot Pro is designed for more demanding manipulation and rapid-prototyping applications.
Pickerbot Comparison at a Glance
Model
Primary Focus
Relative Size
Typical Application
Pickerbot
Original mobile manipulation concept
Larger platform
Agriculture and robotics R&D
Pickerbot Mini
Compact mobile manipulation
Small
Education, ROS, AI and research
Pickerbot Plus
Application-focused Pickerbot
Larger
Agriculture and autonomous harvesting
Pickerbot Pro
Advanced mobile manipulation
Larger/professional
R&D, manufacturing and rapid prototyping
It is worth remembering that Pickerbot has evolved over time. Specifications and configurations can therefore differ between generations.
For a new project, it is better to compare the current configuration and available hardware rather than assuming that specifications from an older Pickerbot platform apply to today's models.
Why ROS 2 Matters
Hardware is only part of the Pickerbot story.
ROS — the Robot Operating System — provides a widely adopted software framework for building robotic applications.
Current Pickerbot Mini and Pickerbot Pro platforms use ROS 2 Humble, allowing developers to work with tools and packages covering areas such as navigation, SLAM, sensor integration, visualization and robot control.
This matters because developing an advanced autonomous robot completely from scratch can consume enormous amounts of engineering time.
Starting with an integrated ROS-compatible platform allows developers to spend more time on the application itself.
Instead of asking, "How do we build a mobile robot?", a research team can begin asking, "What do we want the robot to do?"
That is a significant difference.
NVIDIA Jetson and AI Robotics
Another important feature of the modern Pickerbot platforms is NVIDIA Jetson computing.
Pickerbot Mini and Pickerbot Pro can be configured with Jetson Orin Nano or Orin NX, depending on the model and required level of processing performance.
Why is that useful?
Modern robots increasingly depend on AI and computer vision.
A robot may need to identify an object, distinguish it from the background, estimate its location and determine how its arm should approach it — all while simultaneously navigating through the environment.
Edge AI computing allows much of this processing to happen directly onboard the robot.
For developers exploring AI-powered robotics, that makes Pickerbot much more than a remote-controlled robotic arm on wheels. It becomes a platform on which perception, decision-making, navigation and physical manipulation can be integrated.
Which Pickerbot Should You Choose?
The right platform ultimately depends on what you want to develop.
For students, universities and researchers getting started with mobile manipulation, Pickerbot Mini is likely to be the most accessible choice.
For advanced R&D, manufacturing research and commercial prototyping, Pickerbot Pro provides the more powerful manipulation platform.
For those researching the history and agricultural development of the platform, the original Pickerbot and Pickerbot Plus demonstrate how the technology has been applied to challenging autonomous harvesting tasks.
Whichever platform you choose, the key advantage of the Pickerbot concept remains the same: mobility and manipulation are combined into a single robotics platform.
That combination opens up far more possibilities than a stationary robotic arm or mobile base can achieve independently.
From a robot navigating through a greenhouse and interacting with crops to a mobile manipulator moving around a research laboratory, Pickerbot provides developers with a foundation for exploring the next generation of autonomous robotics.
FAQ: Pickerbot Models
What is Pickerbot?
Pickerbot is a family of mobile manipulation robots combining a mobile robotic base with an articulated arm, sensors, onboard computing and robotics software. The concept enables robots to navigate an environment and physically interact with objects.
What is the difference between Pickerbot Mini and Pickerbot Pro?
Pickerbot Mini is the smaller platform and is particularly suited to education, ROS 2 development, AI and robotics research. Pickerbot Pro is a larger professional R&D platform incorporating a Unitree Z1 Pro six-axis robotic arm with approximately 740 mm reach and 3 kg payload capability.
Does Pickerbot use ROS?
Current Pickerbot Mini and Pickerbot Pro platforms support ROS 2 Humble, providing developers with access to ROS tools and packages for areas including navigation, SLAM, sensing and robotic control.
Is Pickerbot suitable for AI research?
Yes. Current Pickerbot platforms can use NVIDIA Jetson Orin computers, making them suitable for computer vision, machine learning, autonomous navigation and other edge-AI robotics applications.
Can Pickerbot be used for agriculture?
Yes. Agriculture is one of the applications closely associated with the original development of Pickerbot. Pickerbot and Pickerbot Plus have been associated with autonomous greenhouse and fruit-picking applications.
Which Pickerbot is best for universities?
Pickerbot Mini is particularly attractive for universities and education because it provides an integrated mobile manipulation platform in a relatively compact package. Pickerbot Pro is more appropriate when research requires a larger, more capable robotic arm and advanced mobile manipulation.