In response to the difficulty of mechanical picking of famous tea, a hand-held famous tea shoot picking manipulator was designed based on the analysis of the agronomic requirements of tea picking and manual picking movements. The kinematic model of the picking manipulator was used to obtain the parameter range of magnet distance, active finger angular velocity and active finger turning angle, which were factors affecting the picking efficiency. The Box-Behnken response surface analysis method was used to investigate the interactive effect of the influencing factors on the picking success rate. A quadratic regression model was established with the picking success rate as the response value. The significance ranking of the influencing factors on the picking success rate was active finger angular velocity, magnet distance and active finger angle.The optimization module of Design-Expert 11.0 software was used to optimize the factors with the maximum picking success rate as the optimization objective, and the optimization results were obtained as follows: magnet distance was 40.04mm, active finger rotation angle was 153.0° and active finger angular velocity was 3.38rad/s. The picking experiment of famous tea was carried out with the optimized parameters, and the results showed that the picking success rate was 74.3%, the average speed of three picking was 25.2 pieces/min, the relative error between the test value and the predicted value was less than 5%, and the optimized model results were reliable.