A company in the BC Interior is using robotics and AI to pick mushrooms in an effort to tackle labor issues facing the industry. Sean O'Connor with 4AG Robotics told KelownaNow they are a company with the goal of changing the mushroom picking industry.
The company's website says labor shortages are crippling the industry due to the repetitive and intense labor that goes into working on a mushroom farm and tends to lead to high turnover rates. O'Connor said the system built by 4AG Robotics is capable of running 24 hours a day, harvesting up to 80 lbs per hour all, pruning and thinning crops and weighing and packaging.
KelownaNow asked how exactly the robots work. According to O'Connor, each robotic arm is built with a small camera on it, which is used to determine if a mushroom is ready to be picked or should be left for another day. "That was really one of the big breakthroughs we made over the last year," O'Connor said.
"There's a lot of work that we needed to do with the camera, with the lighting board, and with artificial intelligence to be able to separate each of those mushrooms to truly know which one." O'Connor said it was a "fascinating challenge" to determine how they could build the robots in a way that they could detect the quality of the mushroom and when to pick at the most optimal time before the mushrooms began damaging each other, resulting in food waste.
Read the entire article at Kelowna Now