Design and Simulation of taking-putting seedling manipulator of plug seedling transplanter

Abstract. According to the working requirements of vegetable plug seedling transplanting, and aiming to solve the problem that there are many matrix residues in holes during the transplanting process, a manipulator seedling removal device with end-effector as the finger shovel has been designed. The manipulator can stably clamp multiple seedling bowls, which picks up seedling bowls from high-density disk and puts them down at low-density disk. Seedling picking and releasing between high density and low density cavities can be realized by using variable distance cylinder, and the mechanical properties of the end-effector when clamping the seedling bowl were analyzed. The EDEM software was used to conduct discrete element simulation analysis on the seedling picking process when the shape of the hexagonal spatula was quadrilateral, hexagonal, hollow hexagonal and the seedling picking acceleration a was 0.1m/s², 0.3m/s², 0.5m/s², 0.7m/s², and 0.9m/s². The results showed that the matrix residue in the hole of the hexagonal spatula was the least when the seedling picking acceleration of 0.3m/s² was used for transplanting the seedling pot.