Many attempts hitherto made to operate rice-straw mat looms by electric power have ended in a failure, because of difficulty of picking mechanism. We have recently made investigations, theoretically and experimentally, into the parts particularly related to picking motion and devised a suiable picking mechanism consisting of a shuttle, picker and pick cam of some special structure. The investigations have shown that the values of speed fluctuations, torqu_??_, etc., measured with an experimental model loom, coincide closely with the designed value, although there is some difference between the value of shuttle speed and its running resistance.