As harvesting operation is with the most labor cost, however, the most difficult to realize mechanized work in greenhouse crop production, robotic harvesting technology has been developing rapidly in recent decades. Especially, research on robotic harvesting technology for main crops such as tomatoes, strawberries has been conducted continuously and deeply in Japan. Since the beginning of the new century, research in China in this field has become the most active. Development process of research on robotic harvesting technology for different greenhouse crops in Japan, China, the European Union, South Korea and so on were analyzed, and global main research units and specialists, key technical characteristics, level of development and course of evolution in this field were summarized. In conclusion, the flexibility to complex non-structural environment and deep integration of complex robot system were regarded as two keys to stimulate the development of greenhouse picking robot technology. Finally, it was believed that operation environment factorization, robot configuration standardization, multi-robot cooperation and man-robot collaboration would become the development trend in future, thereby to accelerate the development of robotic harvesting technology and its application in greenhouse industry.