Harvest Automation, Inc. is a robotics startup founded by several former iRobot employees, including Joe Jones, the co-inventor of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. The company's goal is to find new applications for robots. Their first planned robot will be used at container farms to space apart potted plants as they grow. This is a very labor-intensive job, and the robot to do it would be relatively simple, it would just need to pick up each potted plant and move it a little further from other plants.[1]
In January, 2010, the company received 4 million USD in financing from several investors.[2]