China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of edible mushrooms. As the scale of China’s edible mushroom industry continues to expand，traditional manual harvesting methods have become insufficient to meet the demands for high efficiency and low production costs. There is an urgent need to adopt intelligent control technologies to address the harvesting process, which represents the most labor-intensive segment of production. Taking the mechanized harvesting of shiitake mushrooms as an example to analyze the requirements for image recognition,machine vision, and flexible robotic arms, based on the physical characteristics of mature shiitake mushrooms ready for harvest and the attributes of shelf-based cultivation environments. It elaborated on the differences among major edible mushroom varieties, including shiitake, oyster, button, and black fungus mushrooms in terms of target recognition, path planning,harvesting methods,and robotic operational space,emphasizing the unique demands of different species on complex operational systems during harvesting. Finally, the limitations of existing edible mushroom harvesting technologies regarding recognition accuracy,damage minimization, and operational efficiency were discussed, and future development directions for mushroom harvesting robots were proposed. The research result can provide a valuable reference for the advancement of mushroom harvesting robot technology, thereby supporting the full-chain intelligent production of China’s edible mushroom industry.