ROBOTISATION
One bed can be picked at a time. The robot can be easily removed from the growing room.
Left Rob Snowden, on the right Mike Boudreau.
selected mushroom away, twists and picks the mushroom from the bed. Exactly like a picker, and it exerts precisely the right amount of pressure repeatedly.”
95+% pick efficiency According to TechBrew Robotics, picking damage is expected to be limited to less than 5%. When the mushrooms grow close together in clusters, the robot can have a little more dif- ficulty. So for the time being it’s important to ensure the robot is used on a bed with evenly distributed mushrooms and help it in the first few days by thinning some of the mushrooms depending on the spread. Snowden: “During our trials with various prototypes, the growers
The wish to develop a functional picking robot is nothing new. In fact, I can remember that at an edition of the Mushroom Days way back in 1986(!) one of Van Den Top’s cutting machines for mechanical harvesting had been converted into a robotic picker that used a suction cap and arms to pick table tennis balls from a bed. And everyone assumed that within a reasonable timeframe a robot would be developed that could do the same job. Driven by rising labour costs and the challenge of recruiting pickers, plenty of time, effort and cash has been invested in ways of ‘helping’ pickers in recent years. This includes tilting beds with belts that cut and convey the mushrooms from the growing rooms, or systems where pickers stay on a platform above moving beds with a good view of the beds and where the packaging is supplied and removed automatically. But, until now, actually picking the mushrooms has been done by hand. Time will tell whether this development will banish manual picking to the past within the foreseeable future.
wanted to see the robots pick at least 80% of both “breaks”/”flushes” with at least a 95% pick success. We showed in our most recent trials that we’re able to meet those metrics. A small booth housing the controls for the robots is situated outside the growing rooms. The robots can be easily moved to another growing room, which removes any obstacles during activities such as filling and emptying, preparations for growing, and also during cook-out. And remember, the system can be used in virtually every growing room with the Dutch shelving system.”
Ideal for the drawer system “We are in close contact with the Christiaens Group in Horst in the Netherlands,” Boudreau continues, “They are very interested in our solution. A modified version of our robot would also be ideal for their moving drawer system which is gaining in popularity worldwide. We expect to install another 8-32 robots at our customer in BC in the second quarter of this year, and from a later stage this year we hope to supply to European customers, who are also showing high interest in our system. Our objec- tive is to deliver a system with an ROI of three years. Irishman Mel O’Rourke, who worked as European Managing Director at Sylvan, is a member of our board of directors. And come and meet us at the Mushrooms Days in Den Bosch, the Netherlands for a full presentation of the capabilities of our solution.”
30 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
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