Path Optimization for Seedling Transplanting Based on TPCG Strategy

Abstract

In facility agriculture, automated transplanter is used to transplant the healthy seedlings in vacant cells to replace the bad ones. It can make full use of space and nutrition. And the working efficiency could be improved by selecting a shorter transplanting path length. In this paper, a path optimization strategy based on tray position control and greedy algorithm (TPCG) was introduced. 260 samples with randomly location vacant holes tray were used to do transplanting path planning simulation. And TPCG was compared with fixed sequence (FS). The results showed TPCG could shorten over 18% of the path length for 32 cell trays, and more than 16% of path length for 128 cell trays. The transplanting efficiency was improved and the operation time was 0.302s which could meet the real-time requirement of transplanting task.