Design of a Sweet Potato Transplanter Based on a Robot Arm

Traditional sweet potato transplanters have the problem of seedling leakage and can only accomplish one transplantation method at a time, which does not meet the requirements of complex planting terrain that requires multiple transplantation methods. Therefore, this paper proposes a design for a crawler-type sweet potato transplanting machine, which can accomplish a variety of transplanting trajectories and conduct automatic replanting. The machine has a transplanting piece and a replanting piece. The transplanting piece completes the transplanting action through a transplanting robot arm, and the replanting piece detects the transplanting status by deep learning. The mathematical model of the transplanting robot arm is built, and the transplanting trajectory is inferred from the inverse kinematics model of the transplanting robot. In the replanting piece, a target detection network is used to detect the transplanting status. The DBIFPN structure and the CBAM_Dense attention mechanism are proposed to improve the accuracy of the target detection of sweet potato seedlings. The experiment showed that the transplanting robot arm can transplant sweet potatoes in horizontal and vertical methods, and the highest transplanting qualification rate is 96.8%. Compared with the use of the transplanting piece alone, the leakage rate of the transplanting–replanting mechanism decreased by 5.2%. These results provide a theoretical basis and technical support for the research and development of sweet potato transplanters.

DESIGN AND EXPERIMENT OF TRANSPLANTING MACHINE FOR CABBAGE SUBSTRATE BLOCK SEEDLINGS

Aiming at the problems of high specificity and low efficiency of vegetable transplanting machine, a substrate block seedling transplanter was designed. Through theoretical calculation and force analysis, the structural parameters of two key components of automatic seedling separation device and planting device are determined. Taking cabbage seedlings with 40 × 40 × 40mm substrate block size as the experimental object, the effects of forward speed, planting frequency, front conveyor belt speed on lodging rate, missing rate and qualified rate were studied by single factor test and three factor three-level orthogonal test. Based on the analysis of the significance and interaction of the experimental data, the best combination of the forward speed of 1.1km/h, the planting frequency of 55 plants / min and the front conveyor belt speed of 0.5km/h was obtained. The verification test of the best combination showed that the average qualified rate of planting was 93.31%, which met the relevant industry standards.

Performance Evaluation and Viability of a Pedestrian-type Low Land Cabbage Transplanter

This article reports on the performance and costs of owning and operating a pedestrian-type low land cabbage transplanting machine. The tests were carried out on tin-tailing soil at MARDI Kundang Research Station. They were undertaken in view of the need to mechanize low land cabbage transplanting operation due to shortage of agricultural labor. The machine performed satisfactorily when operated on planting bed with or without the existence of the plastic mulch. Cabbage seedlings required bigger holes on the planting bed which is layered with plastic mulch in order to avoid mortality of seedlings due to the heat absorbed by the plastic. Based on the performances test, the results showed that the field efficiency were 91.36% and 92.21% for with and without plastic mulch respectively on the planting bed. On average, 407s were recorded for the machine to transplant the seedlings along 100m planting bed. Compared with the traditional method, the transplanter could give 82-85% saving in labor required to plant the seedlings. The calculated break-even annual use for the implement was 33 ha/year. The implement was projected to be viable to use for 1600 h/year.Keywords: low land cabbage; transplanter; machine performance; work rate, viability