Abstract
Aim of study: To develop a whole row automatic pick-up device using air force to blow out plug seedlings, to avoid the damage to seedlings that the current way of seedling picking by needle insertion induces.Area of study: Jiangsu Province, China.Material and methods: We designed a pick-up device which mainly consists of a seedling transporting device, a seedling air loosening device, a seedling clamping device and an automatic control system. The damage rate of seedling was significantly reduced and the success rate of seedling picking was increased by using the new seedling air loosening method and the new designed end-effectors. A prototype of the new pick-up device was produced according to the calculation results, and the performance tests were arranged under actual production conditions in an indoor laboratory.Main results: The calculation showed that when the diameter of the blowhole in air nozzle is 3.5 mm, and the air pressure is between 0.146 MPa and 0.315 MPa, the seedlings can be blown out successfully. Besides, the clamping strain test showed that the new designed end-effector can meet the requirements of seedling picking. The orthogonal test showed that both the air pressure and water content significantly affected the success ratio. The success ratio reached 96.64% when air pressure was 0.4 MPa, water content was 55%-60% and airflow rate was 100%, what meets the current requirements of transplanting.Research highlights: This research can provide some references for the automatic transplanting technology.
Highlights
China has the highest vegetable production and consumption in the world with the vegetable planting area of 20 million hectares and an annual output of more than 700 million tons (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2019)
With the decrease of labor force and the increase of labor cost, many kinds of vegetables such as pepper, tomato and cucumber are transplanted by using the semi-automatic transplanters (Kumar & Raheman, 2011; Zhang et al, 2011), but these semi-automatic transplanters operate at a low speed because the process of seedling transporting and picking still need to be done manually, so we must find some ways to guarantee the high-speed transplanting and low labor using (Zhang et al, 2013)
In order to improve the transplanting efficiency, we must develop automatic pick-up devices to replace the manual work of seedling transporting and picking
Summary
China has the highest vegetable production and consumption in the world with the vegetable planting area of 20 million hectares and an annual output of more than 700 million tons (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2019). Scholars from all over the world have already developed some high-efficiency automatic pick-up devices (Chen et al, 2014; Thomas & Kumar, 2017; Khadatkar et al, 2018; Ye et al, 2019), which can really realize automatic seedling picking instead of manual work These pick-up devices are mainly composed of end-effectors to realize seedling picking and dropping, as well as some other parts to make sure the end-effectors can reach each working position. Drawing on the successful experience of the rice transplanter, this was aimed to design an automatic pick-up device using air force to blow out vegetable plug seedlings with some flexible clamping end-effectors picking and dropping seedlings. A control program was designed to match the actions between the air loosening device and the end-effectors, and an experiment of prototype was implemented to analyze the optimum parameters of the pick-up device
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