A little Swedish robot that automatically drives itself around a barn while pressure washing and disinfecting was the star attraction at Hog & Poultry Days in Winnipeg.
Dubbed the Clever Cleaner by its inventors, the robot was developed to remove people from the unpleasant and unhealthy job of cleaning livestock facilities, especially hog barns.
The European livestock industry found it difficult to recruit and keep workers, a concern echoed throughout North America.
The Clever Cleaner company maintains that in most barn designs, its robot can perform at least 80 percent of the cleaning normally done by a person operating a high pressure cleaner.
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This reduces human exposure to nitrogen compounds, reducing respiratory and other health problems associated with barn cleaning. It also reduces the repetitive strain to back, neck and arm muscles caused by hours of pressure washing.
According to one Manitoba hog producer observing the Clever Cleaner display, it should also help with what has become known as the “take this job and shove it, I ain’t working here no more” syndrome.
He speculated that the Clever Cleaner can get people away from the unpleasant cleaning chores and keep them involved in healthier and more rewarding activities in a hog operation.
The Clever Cleaner is able to access areas not easy for people to reach because the boom arm reaches 18 feet in any direction, including straight up.
It swings through a 400 degree arc and the twin nozzles at the tip have a combined swivel of 360 degrees. This means it can wash everything within a 36 foot circle around the machine. If the human eye can see it, the nozzle can squirt it, reaching behind pillars and into obscure and cramped spots that are difficult for people.
The robot is made of stainless steel and corrosion resistant materials, so it can handle higher temperatures and stronger cleaning compounds than human operators tolerate. These hygiene factors help reduce the number of mites, fungal spores and bacteria that affect the health of hogs and people. The current group of workers are more apt to stay on the job and the next bunch of pigs should be healthier.
Jean Fournier operates 18 hog barns in Saint-Bernard, Que. He recently began importing the Clever Cleaner into Canada because his farm was experiencing the typical problem of finding workers who would stay. Like many livestock operations, the lack of a stable workforce was hurting his bottom line.
Fournier said the $50,000 cost for his first Clever Cleaner has solved most of those problems. Although that investment is approximately double the annual salary of a hog barn worker, he said it’s a fixed cost that he pays only once.
“Now I have no human operator on site when we clean one of my barns. I start my Clever Cleaner at 6 p.m. when I leave for the day and when I get back in the morning, the barn is clean and almost completely dry.”
The cleaning time varies depending on the size and design of the barn and how thorough the operator wants the cleaning job. A small barn might take only one or two hours while a large barn or one that requires two passes might take 10 hours.
The self-contained robot does not require an electrical connection. It’s powered by a 24 volt, twin 12 volt battery system that can run 48 hours continuously before it needs a recharge.
However, while the robot doesn’t need outside power, the Clever Cleaner system does not include a pressure washer. It’s designed so the barn owner plugs his own pressure pump, motor, cleaning chemicals and water supply into the Clever Cleaner.
“I’d say the robot does over 80 percent of the total cleaning job for us. But the important thing is that it does 100 percent of the dirty work. The jobs that drive people to quit are all handled very well by the robot and that keeps my staff happy,” said Fournier.
Although the immediate Canadian market for the Clever Cleaner is the hog industry, Fournier said it also has a place in dairy and chicken operations and probably in food processing plants and other industries with high standards of hygiene.
He said the programming feature makes the machine applicable for many different situations.
“You program it to clean a certain way and it repeats that procedure over and over again, as many times as you want, exactly the way you programmed it the first time – the path you want the cart to follow, the boom movements, the swivel nozzles, everything. You only wash a facility the first time with an operator running the machine. One joystick controls everything so it’s very easy to program.
“As you are doing this initial cleaning with the joystick, the computer is memorizing and storing all the data and all the instructions. So it’s only as good as the programmer. If the person misses one spot during the manual wash operation with the joystick, then the robot will miss that same spot over and over again. The memory is perfect.
“But it’s not a problem if you miss something. You simply go back and program in that one spot and that’s it. You’ve fixed it.”
Fournier said if a hog operation has 30 identical pens, the robot is programmed once and it’s set to handle all 30. If the pens are different, then each must be programmed individually.
In each location, a reference marker is the starting point. When you position the robot at this starting point, a sensor on the robot touches this reference marker tab. The robot picks up the electronic signal and instantly recognizes the barn. Once the reference points have been touched, the human operator starts the robot and leaves the building.
“If you don’t position the cart exactly in the right spot, that’s OK. The robot finds itself with the reference marker, so it’s still totally accurate,” Fournier said.
“If you decide one particular barn looks dirtier and you want it washed twice, you just punch that instruction into the control pad. Or maybe you want to wash the floor twice. Just punch it into the pad.”
All four tires on the Clever Cleaner cart are steering tires. They travel along the alleys turned just slightly into the curb so the machine remains stable and follows a perfect pattern.
In Western Canada, the Clever Cleaner is handled by Robert Dueck at Palm Lite Systems in Steinbach, Man. For more information, contact him at 204-326-6987 or visit www.ro-main.com/eng/home.html.
