Development of a doorframe-typed swinging seedling pick-up device for automatic field transplantation

Abstract

<p>A doorframe-typed swing seedling pick-up device for automatic field transplanters was developed and evaluated in a laboratory. The device, consisting of a path manipulator and two grippers, can move the pins slowly to extract seedlings from the tray cells and return quickly to the pick-up point for the next extraction. The path manipulator was constructed with the creative design of type-Ⅱ mechanism combination in series. It consists of an oscillating guide linkage mechanism and a grooved globoidal cam mechanism. The gripper is a pincette-type mechanism using the pick-up pins to penetrate into the root mass for seedling extraction. The dynamic analysis of the designed seedling pick-up device was simulated with ADAMS software. Being the first prototype, various performance tests under local production conditions were conducted to find out the optimal machine operation parameters and transplant production conditions. As the gripper with multiple fine pins was moved by the swing pick-up device, it can effectively complete the transplanting work cycle of extracting, transferring, and discharging a seedling. The laboratory evaluation showed that the pick-up device equipped with two grippers can extract 80 seedlings/min with a 90% success and a 3% failure in discharging seedlings, using 42-day-old tomato plantlets. The quality of extracting seedlings was satisfactory.</p>