Agaricus Robotics Ltd is a high-profile spin-out from the University of Lincoln, home to the world's first Global Centre for Excellence in Agricultural Robotics. The company is also funded and supported by the Ceres Agri-tech Fund and by Cambridge Enterprise, the commercial arm of the University of Cambridge. Robotic crop harvesting is listed as the number one UK and a global priority for the fresh produce sector to help address the growing labour crisis. The mushroom industry is one of those sectors facing significant labour shortages exasperated by the need to pick mushrooms by hand to avoid bruising. Agaricus Robotics was founded to meet this challenge by developing a commercially viable novel mushroom harvesting robot that can autonomously pick individual mushrooms without damage, thus offering growers a reliable solution to labour shortages.