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Automation with care for the mushroom industry

How to automate a process that requires so much care as handling mushrooms? For TLT Automation, answering this question required both extensive expertise and an integrated handling automation solution from Siemens.

Stacks of shelves line the growing room where the pickers are busy harvesting mushrooms from their beds and placing them in conveyor belts that then vanish through a door for further processing. While far from serene, the environment is cool and calm – quite a contrast to the busy activities outside, where pallets of packaged mushrooms are loaded onto trucks to be shipped to markets in Belgium and France. Welcome to Ingelmunster, a small town in western Belgium which is one of country's hubs for mushroom production.

A suitable solution for a very delicate product
While still called a farm, the newest production facility that TLT has built for a producer is more akin to an industrial production facility, including advanced sorting and handling systems and even cloud connectivity for data analysis. But the road to this impressive solution was rocky, as Jan-Emiel Tack, Director at TLT Automation BV explains: "When you want to automatically handle mushrooms, you need to be very careful. Mushrooms are very delicate, and any bruise will show up on them just a few hours later." However, there was and still is a great need to automate mushroom farming, Tack continues: "One of the biggest challenges in mushroom farming is finding the hands to pick them."

Rethinking the farm
To automate farming operations, TLT Automation had to completely rethink the way a mushroom farm operates. The key was to separate the actual picking – which is still done by hand – from the sorting and packaging process. To be able to do this, TLT designed a new growing room where the pickers place the mushrooms on conveyor belts. "From that on, the entire cleaning, sorting and packaging process is done automatically." Separating the process like this has immediately benefitted efficiency, says Tack. Pickers can now use both hands to pick the mushrooms and are able to work more ergonomically so they pick up to three times more mushrooms in the same amount of time. But the automation did not stop there.

Picking the right solution
After leaving the growing room, the mushrooms are trimmed and then visually inspected by a camera system that records the size and color of each individual mushroom. This information is then transferred to the control of a deltapicker that automatically lifts the mushrooms from the belt and places them in punnets for shipping. All operations are controlled by SIMATIC ET 200SP Open Controllers including the delta pickers. This way, TLT Automation can use one controller for the entire process: general automation, robot control, and safety systems. All functions are engineered in TIA Portal. For the delta pickers, Siemens supported the project with their SIMATIC Handling and Robotics Toolbox, a ready-to-use collection of software libraries for handling and robotics applications. The compact SINAMICS S210 servo drives connect to the motors via a single cable, which makes the solution very efficient to install.

Exploring solutions through flexibility and integration
For Jan-Emiel Tack, using and integrated solution for control and engineering was not only beneficial with respect to engineering efficiency: "Though features like the user-defined kinematics, we are able to define and test different solutions for a given tasks or expand our systems with new kinematics. For example, we could also work with tripod systems or an artificial arm for the sorting process depending on requirements. This gives us a lot of flexibility in our designs." With the open controller, TLT Automation was not only able to control all automation and robotic systems but also integrate the vision systems for the mushrooms –and the possibilities do not end there, says Tack: "We are also uploading data from to a secure clod for analysis."

Gaining speed with a digital twin
Working with an integrated solution from Siemens also enabled TLT Automation to benefit from more advanced simulation features. "The mushroom sorting process requires that we align the motion of the delta pickers with the conyeyor belt, and this requires quite complex calculations. With the digital twin that Siemens provided, we were able to test our solution on a digital model. This has definitely saved weeks in project time, and we could do the tests with no risk to equipment."

Making more of the data
While the new mushroom farm – or mushroom facility, as Tack prefers to call it – is working as planned, Jan-Emiel and Jan-Baptist Tack are already working on the next steps, part of which are already trialed in the company's assembly: "We are currently working on automating the logistics of the filled mushrooms punnets to further increase efficiency. We need the matching machines and processes, but we also need a lot of data for this – and the open controller can provide this." TLT Automation is already using operational data in the cloud for performance analyses, and plans to provide additional services like data-driven operator or maintenance support for the mushroom facility. And then there's the process of harvesting: "At present, there is no fully automatic solution, as human hands are still suited best." But with the rapid evolution of technologies like robotics and AI, who knows. What ever the road ahead, Jan-Emiel Tack feels they are well prepared, not least due to the collaboration with Siemens, he says: "A perfect pick for us."

Source: Siemens

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