mail: contact@agri-collect.com

website: later

Cukita - The project

This project is addressing the fresh oyster mushrooms market, for which many human workers are needed to harvest them. The high level of humidity, the relatively low temperature (~13°C), or the mushrooms’ spores make the working conditions really hard for the harvesters and can even lead to health problems in the worst cases. In Switzerland, our high salaries reduce competitiveness in comparison to foreign countries such as Poland. Harvesting costs, which come from manual labour that represents more than 65% of the workforce for a producer like Wauwiler AG or Gerber Champignon AG, are much higher. In conclusion, this project would address three main problems: poor working conditions leading to health problems, a lack of competitivity compared to foreign countries and sub-optimized production processes.

To solve this, we are developing a robot which harverts mushrooms in the caves.

Why at Octanis?

Octanis is one of the few places where you can see projects grow and people evolve and acquire skills. We believe that crafting, building in your garage is not as fun as having other people around to share your progress. Also, there are experienced members at Octanis from which we can get advices and this is very important to us. This is why we want to stay close to Octanis. We hope that later we will be able to share tips and tricks like people did with us.

Minigrant

We are very happy that Octanis is willing to support us through a minigrant: it which allows us to rent a bench as we do not have income right now. One thing which is very, and we want to insist, very benificial to us is also the support that we can get from the experienced members.

What we are working on right now

One thing we learnt is that it is very easy to get a basic component working. But the true difficulty comes in the components integration, and having several devices interacting together is not as easy as we thought at the beginning.

From day to day we solve unexpected problems, the gripper we developed gave us a few headaches already and the problems we're facing right now are of all kinds. We expect by the end of December to have the firsts tests done in a producer's cave and to already have the main points on which we need to work for the future iterations.

Pictures