Development of an Autonomous Robotic Mushroom Harvester

摘要

The process of development of a new robot is one of the modern technological arts. This process involves multiple complex steps and recursive approach. In this project, a solution for automatic harvesting of mushrooms is developed. In order to design an effective solution, it is necessary to explore and take into consideration the limitations of grasping very soft and fragile objects (particularly mushrooms). We will elaborate several strategies of picking and analyze each strategy to formulate the design requirements, develop a solution, and finally, evaluate the efficiency of the proposed solution in actual farm conditions for real mushrooms. The mushroom farm used in our study utilizes Dutch shelving systems, which pose stringent space requirements on the construction. The main challenge in this project is the development of a robot with 7 degrees of freedom (DOF), which would fit into the existing infrastructure with no or minimal changes on the existing infrastructure.