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SoftGrip: Towards a Soft Robotic Platform for Automatized Mushroom Harvesting

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European Robotics Forum 2024 (ERF 2024)

Abstract

The fresh food industry significantly depends on manual labor, which can make up to 40% of total production costs. Until now, implementing safe robotic automation for gently harvesting fresh produce has been difficult due to the complex and delicate nature of these tasks. The EU-funded SoftGrip Project aims to revolutionize the fresh food sector with technological advancements. By integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic automation, it is possible to achieve gentle harvesting, enhance productivity, and lower labor costs for small and medium-sized European mushroom farms. The innovative smart soft gripper, designed to learn skills from expert harvesters through imitation learning, seeks to provide an economically feasible, scalable, and environmentally friendly solution, transforming the mushroom cultivation industry and the wider fruit market.

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Acknowledgement

The authors thank all the members of the SoftGrip consortium for their valuable contribution. This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 through the SoftGrip project (contract 101017054).

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Correspondence to Niccoló Pagliarani .

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© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Pagliarani, N. et al. (2024). SoftGrip: Towards a Soft Robotic Platform for Automatized Mushroom Harvesting. In: Secchi, C., Marconi, L. (eds) European Robotics Forum 2024. ERF 2024. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-76424-0_9

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