The feature called Opti- Cruise uses artificial intelli- gence to control the speed of the rotary platform.
Control and OptiCruise are part of a whole new way of think- ing about milking and the cow, which starts by getting the speed of the carousel under control. The speed control in the conventional milking parlours is currently based on the maxi- mum capacity of the milker on duty. This is for example 14 sec- onds per cow, so the milker put the speed of the carousel on a certain level. But when you want to automate this process, you have to know what the optimum speed of the carousel is. In practice, we see that some cows spend too much time in the milking parlour and we try to get all the cows out of the carou- sel as quickly as possible. Schut: “The feature called OptiCruise uses artificial intelligence and can help in doing this by auto- matically controlling the speed of the rotary platform.” As each cow steps on to the parlour, the OptiCruise knows the milking history of the cow, its expected milk quantity and the remain- ing milking time of the other cows already on the carousel. With this information, the system optimises carousel speed. Dr John Daly, research and innovation manager at Dairymaster also addresses the issue: “Even for experienced milkers, it’s not easy to get the carousel speed right. Our product is really to do with parlour control, rather than the actual milking side of it. It’s to do with the cow throughput and automatically adjust- ing the parlour speed based on the attachment speed of the operator. If Mission Control flags a problem and the farmer needs to stop or slow down the rotary to inspect a cow, Op- tiCruise takes account of the stoppage and automatically ad- justs the speed of the carousel to recover that time. This means farmers know they will be able to milk faster and take time to
examine and treat problem cows, so it’s better for the animals and farmers.” Schut adds: “When there is a very slow milker in the group for example, we can decide to let her do another round in the carousel. The farmer can also easily select sick cows from the carousel. Overall, we can reduce the time spent in the parlour by 50 seconds per cow per milking. This means an efficiency improvement of 15-20%”. The data in Mission Control is constantly refreshed.
Milking clusters should not fall off Next to speed control, labour reduction in the carousel barn can also be accomplished by making sure that the milking clusters don’t fall off. “We are advocating the natural way of milking and with our equipment we want to mimic nature and how the calf drinks. This means a high vacuum during milking and a low vacuum in the resting phase (in nature, this is the phase where the calf breaths in between drinking). It is all about getting the suck and release rhythm close to nature. This is better for the blood circulation in the teat and hence results in a better milk flow compared to other systems. The milking clusters catch less air and therefore hardly ever fall off,” explains Shut. Dairymaster therefore uses a vacuum pres- sure of 47 kpa during milking and 12 kpa during the resting phase. In a normal system, milking is done at 38 kpa during milking and 32 kpa in the resting phase. “By using a more natural flow, you create less pressure on the udder. Combined with a reduced time that the cow spends in the milking parlour, we see improvements in udder health,” says Schut.
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