Design of a Scara Robotic Arm for Mushroom Harvesting

Agricultural automation is an increasingly common trend. These activities involve the use of solutions well-known from other high-tech industries. Such solutions are robots replacing human work in places where work is monotonous, in a forced body position or must be highly efficient. As an example, this publication cites the analysis of needs and the construction of a robot for mushroom picking. Poland is one of the world’s largest producers of these mushrooms. Poor working conditions and growing wage pressure cause producers to look for other solutions. There are many challenges in the automation of mushroom picking, starting from unfavourable environmental conditions, the construction of mushroom growing racks and quality issues. The introduction to the paper includes an overview of solutions for automatic mushroom harvesting. In the further part of the paper, the Authors focus on presenting and describing their own platform for detecting and for picking Agaricus bisporus mushrooms. Due to the specific nature of mushroom cultivation, it was necessary to analyse environment and mechanical limitations. The authors chose SCARA kinematics, therefore the paper presents an analysis of kinematics, a description of the structure, accuracy tests and proposals for further improvements in the robot design. Because entire arm moves along the Z axis, it was experimentally checked how such a large moving mass affects the positioning accuracy.