A team from Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences has developed a robotic mechanism for automating the picking and cutting of button mushrooms.

To automate the harvesting of button mushrooms, the team built a prototype that picks and trims the mushrooms in a shelf-growing system.

Source: Penn State

Designed to work in conjunction with a machine vision system, the mushroom-picking mechanism replicates the hand-picking process associated with this crop, which is a labor intensive task that requires the identification of mature mushrooms and the ability to both detach mushrooms and remove stems.

As such, the prototype features a suction-cup mechanism for grabbing and inspecting the mushroom cap for bruising, a picking end-effector, a 4-degree-of-freedom positioning end-effector for moving the picking end-effector, a stem trimming end-effector and an electro-pneumatic control system.

If developed, the mushroom-picking mechanism could be used to fill worldwide labor shortages, particularly in the agricultural industry.

The prototype is detailed in the journal Transactions of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers.