Innovation Spring 2026

The precision of robotic systems is married with AI to optimize food product cultivation. P hoto : J oshua N eurfeld

AI-assisted robots may be a game-changer in agriculture

Mushroom-picking robots In agriculture, actuation – how technology interacts with crops – can be one of the most complicated aspects of automation because of plants’ dynamic sizes. Take, for example, the case of mushroom farming. Mushrooms grow rapidly at variable rates across a single bed. Harvesting therefore requires repeated passes, selective thinning, and precise handling to avoid bruising or overcrowding. These are all constraints that challenge conventional robotic grippers designed for rigid, repeatable objects. This crop-specific challenge is now being tackled for the first time in industry. BC-based 4AG Robotics (pronounced “forage”) is using machine vision combined with custom robotic actuators to precisely harvest mushrooms at scale. “We have the first deployment of commercially available mushroom-picking robots in the world,” said James Gibson, P.Eng., Director of Mechanical Engineering at 4AG.

While produce at the grocery store may look similar to years before, new mechanisms and technology are changing the way some growers cultivate and harvest food products. The food and beverage industry over the past century has been focused primarily on developing the scale and control required to process large quantities of food. Now, in the same way that mechanization transformed food processing, machine learning has the potential to create systems capable of handling complicated cultivation and harvesting skills autonomously. At Simon Fraser University (SFU), researcher and Associate Director, Mechatronics Systems Engineering, Dr. Woo Soo Kim, P.Eng., frames the future of agricultural automation around innovation in three interwoven components: actuation, sensing, and intelligence. “Engineers today want to create networks, utilizing the combination of intelligent robotics, sensors, and AI, to create full systems,” said Kim.

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Spring 2026

Innovation