A Robotic Pepper Transplanter

A robotic manipulator with 5 deg of freedom and a gripper was mounted on a commercial pot-type mechanical transplanter which had been modified to match the manipulator's pick-and-place operation. The system used an 8-bit microcomputer as a master control for the manipulator. The manipulator picked the pepper plants individually from the trays and dropped them through a guide hole on the transplanter. After the plant left the guide hole, inclined press wheels covered the plant roots with soil while a kicker plate kept the plant properly oriented. The trajectory of the gripper tip was selected to perform the transplanting task rapidly without the manipulator colliding with itself or other parts of the transplanter. The rectangular coordinates for each joint position of the manipulator were represented by a joint variable. Three techniques of solving these joint variables were studied and applied. The manipulator was controlled by a pre-programmed set of joint move instructions.