WHAT is kept in the dark and has manure piled beneath it? The answer is this prototype mushroom-picking robot from Silsoe Research Institute in Bedfordshire. The robotic arm is attached to a camera which scans the mushrooms and sends the signals to an image recognition system. 鈥淏ecause mushrooms have a hemispherical shape, they shine brightest in the middle,鈥� says John Reed, head of robotics research at Silsoe.
The machine can be programmed to pick any size of cap. The picker uses a dual-action technique to pluck the mushrooms. It bends each mushroom into an unoccupied area of the tray and then twists it off. It can cope with one mushroom every 6 seconds 鈥� about the same as a human picker 鈥� but Reed expects a commercial machine to be twice as fast. At that speed, he says, it should reduce the industry鈥檚 overheads.
