One of the main issues in the mushroom farming industry is the lack of labor. Mushroom farming has had very few innovations throughout the years and is still an incredibly labor-intensive and repetitive process.
The process is often difficult, too. From scaling shelving up to four meters high to long shifts in back-breaking positions, it often is not safe or comfortable for humans. Mushrooms also grow incredibly fast, and if the harvest is not created at the right time, then the quality diminishes drastically, and farmers can even lose vast amounts of yield.
The US and Canada combined produce close to 500,000 tons of fresh mushrooms annually. However, this still doesn’t meet the increasing demand for mushrooms now that their benefits are being reported more and more.
That’s where the Canadian-based company 4AG Robotics saw an opportunity to automate this process to try and alleviate the issue and bring more mushrooms to the market—with a lower labor overhead.
How the mushroom-picking robot works
The robot that they developed is fully autonomous, meaning that it can operate without any intervention from humans; it is a vision-guided robot. The robot uses AI to make decisions about which mushrooms they harvest, when to harvest them, and how they’re separated. They’re smart enough to learn over time, and the company hopes that they will eventually be better at harvesting than humans.
The robots are also transportable and attach to the farm’s existing Dutch shelving, meaning that infrastructure doesn’t need to be changed before the robots can be used. Most farms worldwide use the same standardized shelves, which makes this easier, and if not, they claim that the robots can still be retrofitted.
The robots move along the shelves one by one to pick mushrooms before separating them from the stems into two different boxes. They can work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty days a year.
Future expansion plans
So far, the company has run the robot on two proof-of-concept farms, and both have achieved a goal rate of 95% successful picks. The next step for them is to demonstrate the complete autonomous operation of the harvesting system—from thinning, opening bunches, and stem trimming to packaging and transporting the mushrooms out of the growing room.
4AG Robotics also believes that there are no longer any barriers to their expansion and hopes to be on farms in three different countries by the end of September. They also hope to be able to expand into Europe and Australia in the next few months.
