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The vertical spray booms used in tomato crops improve the application of plant protection products with respect to the spray gun, reducing the application volumes and the environmental risks of soil pollution.

155 Transplanting seedlings of flowers and vegetables in greenhouses can be ranked among the stationary cropping processes. When tomatoes are growing, it is necessary to replant them from the pre-planting containers to bigger silvicultural packets after approximately 15 days. This process is provided by the staff without any mechanisation in the small and middle businesses. The seedlings are taken out by hand together with the ball of soil from the pre-planting containers and then they are planted into bigger silvicultural packets with a dibber. in special growing seedlings businesses (Montano Valtr, s.r.o. and Zahradnictví Lysá nad Labem-Litol), flowerpot machines are used. These machines stream the replant process. They fill in the silvicultural bin with the soil and then dig a hole. The whole process is easier but the manual work is necessary even here because the seedlings have to be put in manually. This paper is aimed at this work. The fact that industrial Robots and Manipulators (henceforth iR+M) can be used for this operation has been pointed out by a number of authors. it was already Krutz (1983) who recommended the application of iR+M for transplanting seedlings, mainly due to the monotonous character of this work. The research on the development of a robotic transplanter and its components began several years ago. Hwang and Sistler (1986) developed a commercial pepper transplanter using a basic robotic manipulator. Simonton (1991) developed an end-effector for the handling and manipulating of geranium cuttings. He controlled the position, velocity, and force of the end-effector to minimise damage to the petioles and main stem. An end-effector which utilises a rack and pinion mechanism was developed by Kim et al. (1995). The end-effector converted the rotational motion of the stepping motor to the clipping motion of the finger. Kutz et al. (1986) dealt with an experiment aimed at the verification of applicability of the PUMA industrial Robot (henceforth iR) for transplanting seedlings of tomatoes and marigolds from pre-planting containers with 392 partitions into planting containers with 36 partitions. The objective of this experiment was to define a working cycle of the robot, check its performance, and develop an appropriate end-effector. The verification tests showed that the Abstract: The article deals with the verification of applicability of different types of ABB industrial robots for transplanting seedlings. initial hypothesis was formulated at the beginning namely that the robots with full rotary series and parallel kinematical structure can be employed in the operation of transplanting seedlings. Testing was performed on real types of robots iRB 1400, iRB 140T and iRB 140B, and using model application. The robot iRB 340 was tested in virtual simulation only. Based on the measurements, it was found out that all real robots tested are able to perform the operation of seedlings transplanting involving 36 plants with the cycle duration below 2.7 min and at 100% success rate. Within the given rang...

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