Chrysanthemum Cutting Sticking Robot System

Cutting sticking operation is essential on a chrysanthemum production to enhance its productivity, since many cuttings can be obtained from one mother plant. Usually, human being manually sticks the cuttings to plug tray, however, it takes a lot of time and much labor, since the number of cuttings is said to be about 200 million in a district where yields the highest number of chrysanthemums in Japan, so automation of this operation is desired. The robotic cutting sticking system mainly consisted of three sections; a cutting providing system, a leaf removing device and a planting device. First, a bundle of cuttings was put into a water tank. The cuttings were spread out on the water by vibration of the water tank. The cuttings were picked by a manipulator based on information of cutting position from TV camera. Secondly, another TV camera detected the position and direction of cutting transferred from the water tank by the manipulator and indicated the grasp position of the cutting for the other 5 DOF manipulator moving. Thirdly, the manipulator moved the cutting to a planting device through the leaf removing device and then the cuttings were stuck into a tray by the planting device. In this paper, outline of the robotic components is described.