Development of a Pick-up Device for Plug-Seedlings

플러그묘 취출장치 개발

A seedling pick-up device for vegetable transplanters was developed and its work performance was evaluated at the laboratory. The pick-up device extracts seedlings from a 200-cell tray of seedlings and transfers them to the place where they are to be transplanted into the soil. The device consists of a path generator, pick-up pins and a pin driver. The path generator is a five-bar mechanism comprised of a fixed link, a driving link, a driven link, a connecting link and a slider. The slider is constrained to move along the driven link and a fixed slot of combined straight-line and circular paths. The connecting link joins the driving link and the slider. When the slider moves along the straight-line path of the slot it takes seedlings out from the cell and transfers them to the transplanting hopper when moving along the circular path. A proto-type of the pick-up device was built and tested under the various operational conditions such as age of seedling, approach direction and penetration depth of pins to the cell, holding method of seedling and extracting velocity. The device extracted 30 seedlings per minute with the maximum success ratio of 97% using the seedlings of 23 days old. Some design details were also discussed and suggested to enhance the performance of the device.