Automation in Transplanting:A Smart Way of Vegetable Cultivation

Abstract

Vegetable transplanting is a labourious and timeconsuming field operation when performed manually. The semi-automatic vegetable transplanters are cumbersome to operate due to limitations on manual feeding rates of seedlings which vary with respect to work duration and skill of the operator. Automation in the field of vegetable transplanters has provided opportunities for savings in labour and time required for transplanting operation in open field and controlled environmental structures, i.e. shade nets or polyhouse. The advent and recent advances in transplanting technologies suggest ample scope of working on automated seedling pickup and drop mechanisms using robotics. Use of seedling pickup mechanism in automatic transplanters can repeatedly extract single seedling automatically from the seedling pro-tray with the help of a pair of pins or forks and drop at predefined location. In general, these systems comprise either a machine vision system or end-effector mechanism for extracting the seedling; gripper and a manipulator; indexing drum-type seedling removal device with ejector; or a pick-up system, feeding system and a planting system. Such automated systems have helped ease the transplanting operation and efficient planting of seedlings by maintaining the accuracy, precision and effectiveness in planting seedlings with minimum human intervention. This study highlights the research gaps and developments in smart transplanting technologies used in the field of vegetable cultivation.

Design, Development and Implementation of Automatic Transplanting based on Embedded System for use in Seedling Transplanters

“…2.0 km/h beyond which the transplanting e ciency reduces. At this speed, the transplanting e ciency was 90.3 % which is considered very good (Khadatkar et al, 2018). It was observed from the result that transplanting percentage increases with increase in speed of operation and then reduces afterwards, which may be due to the reason that at higher speed the soil covering was not proper.…”

“…The result indicated that missing per cent decreases with increase in speed of operation as well as increase in angle of feed roller. At S3=2.0 km/h speed and A2= 30 0 , the miss planting was 2.1 % which is considered very good [24].…”

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

“…In Malaysia, cabbage is commonly grown from transplants and the activity is laborious, back breaking and time consuming when it is implemented manually. The conventional practice requires labours to bend the body and squat in order to punch a hole on the ground and plant seedlings by pressing down the root ball in the soil with hands (Khadatkar et al, 2018). The existence of plastic mulch for weed control has aggravated the difficulties to the labours to prepare a planting hole on a raised bed.…”

“…Cabbage transplanter can be found in the market in two forms; automatic and semiautomatic version. The pedestrian-type transplanter is an example of semiautomatic transplanter as it requires a labour to manually transfer the seedlings into the pot supply while automatic tranplanter can eliminate labour as it can self-pick up the seedling from the production tray into the feeder (Khadatkar et al, 2018, Prasanna, 2008.…”

Indicators of severity and intensity of the working process at robotized farms in the Middle Ural

“…Planting of vegetable crops is rather laborious operation that is usually done by hands. The use of a planting robot can reduce the labor intensity; it can improve the efficiency of seedling planting due to high accuracy with minimal human help [3]. A robot with a computer vision system distinguishes cultivated plants from weeds.…”