• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.415-422
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• 2001

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.

• Journal of agriculture & life science
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• v.51 no.1
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• pp.187-192
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• 2017

In various crops, seedlings are preferred to seeds for faster and more effective growth, so transplanters are used for them. This 2-row transplanter was developed to promote the mechanization of vegetable transplanting work which depends on human power. and it can automatically supply seedling tray and transport picked up seedling to the planting hopper. Also, we judged performance of transplanter with comparing seedling missing plant ration according to two types of pick-up method. Result of experiment, in finger-type picking up of 265 seedlings, missing plant ratio was 13.7% with 17 failures of pick-up and 15 collapse of bed soil. and In fork-type picking up of 200 seedlings, failure of pick-up was not appeared and missing plant ratio was low as 4% with 6 dropped during transfer. Therefore for 2-row automatic transplanter, fork-type pick-up device was found to be compatible.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.30 no.2 s.109
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• pp.81-88
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• 2005

Manual transplanting Chinese cabbage needs 184 hours per ha in Korea. Mechanization of Chinese cabbage transplanting operation has been highly required because it needs highly intensive labor during peak season. This study was conducted to developed walking-type Chinese cabbage transplanter. In order to find out design factor of the transplanter, a kinematic analysis software, RecurDyn, was used. The prototype was tested in the circular soil bin and its operating motion was captured and analyzed using high speed camera system. Prototype was one row type which utilized original parts of engine, transmission and etc. from walking-type rice transplanter in order to save the manufacturing cost. Success ratio of pick-up device of hole-pin type and latch type were $96.0\%$ and $99.2\%$, respectively. which was highly affected by feeding accuracy of feeding device of seedling. Transplanting device of the prototype produced a elliptic loci which were coincident with those produced by the computer simulation. Prototype proved good performance in transplanting with mulching and without mulching operation, either. Working performance of prototype was 22 hours per ha and operation cost of the prototype was 961,757 won per ha. So, it would reduce $88\%$ of the labor and $29\%$ of operation cost.