The robot's work begins after dark, when a California strawberry field is mostly rows, irrigation lines, and the quiet machinery of a crop still waiting for morning. TRIC Robotics sends autonomous machines through that darkness, carrying UV-C equipment and bug vacuums instead of a spray tank.
The company has expanded from a half-acre trial in 2021 to a fleet of 15 robots treating more than 1,500 acres of commercial strawberries in California in 2026, according to the company report. That is a different kind of milestone than a successful demonstration: the machines now have to find their place inside real field operations, where timing and repeatability matter as much as the novelty of the machine itself.
A Night Shift for Crop Protection
TRIC says the robots operate nightly to target fungal pathogens with UV-C light and remove insects with onboard vacuums. The arrangement places the equipment in the narrow space between a research plot and a conventional tractor pass—automated, recurring work that still has to coexist with harvest crews, irrigation, field access, and the uneven geometry of a berry ranch.
That operating pattern is part of the larger California ag-tech experiment. UC Agriculture and Natural Resources has been putting commercially oriented tools in front of growers through field demonstrations in the Salinas Valley, where companies show equipment for tasks including weeding, thinning, harvesting, drone application, and irrigation management. The point is less to admire a machine than to let farm operators test whether it survives contact with their own production routines.
From Strawberry Rows to a Wider Platform
TRIC's stated ambition extends beyond strawberries: the company wants to build a broader robotics platform for multiple crops. That matters in California because a machine designed around one high-value crop can become more useful—and easier to justify—if its navigation, lighting, sensing, and maintenance systems can travel to another one.
The commercial question is therefore larger than whether UV-C can do useful work in a berry field. A platform has to earn its keep across changing row widths, crop canopies, disease pressures, and work calendars. California's growing roster of farm-technology trials suggests there is no shortage of machines looking for that answer; the harder audience is the grower deciding where one belongs on Tuesday night.
UC ANR Innovate and Farmhand Ventures are also seeking commercially ready agricultural technologies through the UC ANR Connect program, a grower-informed channel that could give companies another route into California fields. For robotics firms, those encounters can expose the unglamorous requirements that brochures tend to omit: access, service, training, and whether the machine can keep working when the crop is at its busiest.
TRIC's expansion makes strawberries an early commercial proving ground for a category of equipment that has usually arrived in smaller pieces—one trial block, one task, one season at a time. The next evidence California growers will need is operational: what the machines cost to deploy, how consistently they perform under field conditions, and how readily the same system can move into another crop.