Dr Alistair Scarfe

Dr Alistair Scarfe is a New Zealand engineer and the co-founder and chief technology officer of Robotics Plus, the Tauranga agritech company whose farm robots are now part of Japan’s Yamaha Motor.

Scarfe is the technical half of the Robotics Plus story. He earned a Bachelor of Engineering in mechatronics with first-class honours and then a PhD in industrial automation, both from Massey University, where the subject of his thesis was a prototype autonomous kiwifruit harvester. That research, robots doing the physical, repetitive work of horticulture, became the seed of the company. Early in his career he was recognised as a rising talent, named a finalist for the New Zealand Hi-Tech Young Achiever of the Year and winning a Tauranga young-innovator award.

The company took shape when Scarfe, then still a PhD candidate, met horticulture entrepreneur Steve Saunders during an industry visit to Massey. Saunders saw the commercial potential in Scarfe’s automation work and backed him to build it; the partnership of industry insight and engineering depth became Robotics Plus. Scarfe led the technology from its first commercial prototypes, including a robotic apple packer trialled in both New Zealand and the United States, through to the autonomous Prospr platform.

As CTO and a company director, Scarfe has been responsible for the execution of the company’s projects: building rugged, reliable machines that work in real orchards and vineyards, not laboratories and that have to be cost-effective enough for growers to adopt. That combination of advanced robotics and hard commercial discipline is what drew Yamaha Motor in as an investor in 2017 and, ultimately, as the acquirer in 2025, folding Robotics Plus into the new Yamaha Agriculture while keeping its engineering base in Tauranga.

The company’s flagship, Prospr, is an autonomous hybrid vehicle that can handle spraying, weed control and other orchard tasks, with a single operator overseeing multiple machines remotely. The system also extends beyond horticulture: Scarfe led the development of a robotic log scanner for the forestry industry, demonstrating the breadth of the underlying automation platform. The full company story is in Robotics Plus: the New Zealand company building farm robots for the world.

Scarfe’s profile is noteworthy because he is one of New Zealand’s clearest examples of deep university research becoming a globally relevant product. His work shows that the country can build genuine hardware and robotics companies, not only software and export them to the world, a theme it shares with the wider New Zealand agritech story.

Sources: NZ Herald · NZ Manufacturer · Rural Delivery