Posted: March 17, 2022
Researchers Long He, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering, and Mingsen Huang, visiting doctoral student, created a robotic mushroom picker and demonstrated its effectiveness for the automated harvesting of button mushrooms.
Mingsen Huang (left) and Long He (right)
In a new study, the prototype, which is designed to be integrated with a machine vision system, showed that it is capable of both picking and trimming mushrooms growing in a shelf system. The research is important, according to lead author He, because the mushroom industry has been facing labor shortages and rising labor costs. In findings published in Transactions of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, He and colleagues report that tests showed that the picking-end effector was successfully positioned to the target locations and its success rate was 90 percent at first pick, increasing to 94.2 percent after second pick.
--Jeff Mulhollem
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