Design of an automatic casting potted-seedling system for vegetable transplanter

To ensure the potted-seedling cast into the duckbilled-type planting shoe when the automatic vegetable transplanter is working, the automatic dropping potted-seedling system was specially designed. An encoder was fixed at the central axis of the centre of gyration of the planting shoe, and a sensor was fixed at the proper place of the duckbilled-type planting shoe trail. When the planting shoe reached the position, the pulse signal was generated by the sensor and processed by PLC, so the data of the transient rotation velocity of the duckbilled-type planting shoe at the position was collected. According to the data, the pulse of driving electromotor which casted potted-seedling into duckbilled-type planting shoe was generated by PLC in right time, so the electromotor was driven immediately and the operation of dropping potted-seedling was finished. The study will be of great help for the further research on the vegetable automatic transplanter.