The rotating disc has V-shaped indented openings
The bridge used to transfer the system from the pinning to harvesting rooms.
A harvesting room at Heereco in The Netherlands. Another (Christiaens) drawer ready to be harve- sted or sprayed can move on the rails between the beds.
Water can be sprayed when the beds are raised and lowered.
Two Pickers place the mushrooms on the rotating disc with both hands…
...and another person lifts the mushrooms from the disc, after they have been automatically trimmed, and puts them in the final packaging.
vely easy to integrate a picking robot into this system as the robot does not have to move towards the mushrooms- the mushroom come to the robot. There is also enough space to accom- modate a robot. This robot was presented by Roland van Doremaele of the Christiaens Group in collaboration with Stefan Glibetic of the Canadian company Mycionics at the BDC’s annual meeting. Van Dremel “We’re almost there. A picker using both hands averages a per- formance of 50 mushrooms per minute. If you use this approach on a moving drawer system, you have two options: you can pick and use a per- forated blue belt, or our rotating disc, but picking is still a manual process. I’d like to introduce you to my colleague from Micronics, who will explain the robotic harvester in greater detail.” Glibetic: “We started developing a robotic harves- ting system to pick mushrooms in Canada back in 2014. Instead of using traditional suction cups, our system uses touch-sensitive grippers with three fingers. We demonstrated the robot’s ability to pick mushrooms on traditional beds , but it was
Empty packaging is automatically transported into the room by conveyors, and the filled crates exit on a conveyor.
a little slower than a human picker. When we discovered the Christiaens drawer system we were enthusiastic right away as the design and infrastructure were perfect to incorporate a robotic harvester. We were achieving 45 picks per minute with the robot on standard shelving but think we can improve on this pick rate with the Christiaens system. We think we can harvest 60-70% of the mushrooms with a robot while the remainder, especially thinning the mushrooms on days one and two, can be done manually with this rotating disc system. We plan to demonstrate the robot in action in Canada this November. The next stage is to have 36 robots ready in 2024 and in 2025 we will be able to supply every mushroom farm with a drawer system. The robot costs €100,000 and has a 16-month payback period.”
www.christiaensgroup.com
www.mycionics.com
MUSHROOM BUSINESS 37
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