Development of a transplanting robot system for tissue culture plants (I) - a soft gripper -

조직배양체 이식로봇 시스템의 개발 (I) - 소프트 그리퍼 -

Transplanting process during the tissue culture of potato seedlings is costly, since the cost of highly skilled labor working in the sanitary environment takes up about 60-70% of the production cost. The objective of this study was to develop a soft gripper of a transplanting robot system for the labor-saving tissue culture. The prototype of the soft gripper was consisted of power-transmitting part finger and plant contacts. The power transmitting part transformed the rotating motion of a step motor to the reciprocating motion of the finger. Plant stems used in the test were potato seedlings cultured for six weeks. The dimensional characteristics of cultured seedlings, the compressive strengths of the stems, the extractive force from the culture medium and the gripping force of the finger were measured. A proper gripping force was found to be 0.343N at the extractive force of 0.41N when the plant contacts were made of silicon. Sixteen plants out of 70 trials were tangled with others, resulting in the success rate of 77.1%.