Mushroom Robo-Pic - Development of an autonomous robotic mushroom picking system

This project aims to develop a new robotic picking system to harvest fresh mushrooms reducing labour demands by ca. 66%. The work will be carried out by a consortium comprising: Littleport Mushroom Farms, a major UK mushroom supplier; ABB, a major UK-based robotic supplier; Stelram, a small specialist UK developer of robotic solutions; and the University of Lincoln, a leading research group focusing on robotic application in the food industry. The project will integrate novel soft robotic actuators, vision systems and data analysis with autonomous robots and will deliver an end to end solution to a problem that has challenged the industry for many years. It will greatly increase the competitiveness of UK production and the outcomes are directly transferable to many sectors of the UK food and manufacturing industries.