This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The Selective Coffee Shaker Brudden DSC18, is part of the Assisted Coffee Harvesting, for the year’s largest production peaks. This machine, which is a joint development between the Brazilian company Brudden (https://www.brudden.com.br/) and Cenicafé, applies innovative principles in fruits harvesting. It uses the branches to propagate vibration waves and causes the coffee fruits to fall due to fatigue of the fruit peduncle. The machine bases its selectivity in the fact that ripe coffee fruits need fewer cycles to fall down than immature fruits. The machine must be used in conjunction with the harvest pass retention and plastic tarps on the ground to receive the detached fruits. In order to determine the performance of the machine in real conditions, it was evaluated in coffee plantations with different terrain slopes, trees ages and trees densities, at Cenicafe´s Experimental Stations. The results showed the following mean values: yield of 28.53 kg h-1, immature fruits content in the harvested mass of 6.07%, 6.67 ripe units per site of fruits left on the trees, and 12.77 units per site of fruits left on the ground. The yield with the machine was 180% higher than the one obtained by an average coffee picker with the traditional system. The low content of immature fruits in the harvested mass confirms the selectivity of the machine, the ripe fruits left on the trees are acceptable, while, the fruits lost to the ground were very high for reasons unrelated to the operation of the machine.