Design and test of combined pick-up device for automatic and precise transplanting of vegetable plug seedlings

Precision planting is one key point of precision agriculture.A doorframe type swing seedling pick-up device for the automatic precise field transplanter was designed and tested in a laboratory.The seedling device could automatically extract seedlings from growing trays, transfer them, and release them into the planting unit where they were to be precisely transplanted into the ground.It consisted of a path manipulator and two grippers.The path manipulator for seedling extraction was constructed with creative design of Ⅱ-type mechanism combination in series.It consisted of an oscillating guide linkage mechanism and a grooved globoidal cam mechanism.According to the planned seedling pick-up trajectory, the design of the path manipulator for seedling extraction was finished with a set of the closed loop vector equation.The gripper was a pincette-type mechanism using the pick-up pins to penetrate into the root mass for seedling extraction.It consisted of multiple pick-up pins, U-type pull rod, shaft, stop block, compression spring and frame.The mechanical dimensions of the gripper were determined by the tray size and plant characteristic with a set of rectangular equations and the boundary constraint conditions.The final gripper was developed on the basis of cultural practice for vegetable seedling in China.A prototype of the seedling pick-up device was constructed to examine whether its working efficacy was satisfactory or not.According to the analysis on the work process, the seedling pick-up device could precisely complete a work cycle of approaching, penetrating, extracting, transferring, erecting and discharging a seedling.Taking pepper seedlings, tomato seedlings and cucumber seedlings as the transplanting objects, the performance tests were conducted to evaluate the practicality and adaptability of the pick-up device.The laboratory evaluation showed that the pick-up device equipped with two grippers could extract 70 seedlings per minute with an average success ratio of 90.49%.The quality of extracting seedlings was satisfactory.