Design and Development of Manually Operated Vegetable Transplanter

Abstract

Farm mechanization in the agriculture field helps in increasing the productivity of the crop which lead to reduction in the overall cost. The process of plating the seedlings in the farm is referred as transplanting. Transplanting is done manually for most of the vegetable crops produced in India and the existing transplanters used mostly are tractor operated. The main objective of the project is to design and build a prototype of the transplanter. The ideas available with National Innovation Foundation-India for the development of transplanter served as the initial platform. Different concepts are generated and evaluated to select the most suitable one. A transplanter broadly consists of three modules namely planting mechanism, feeding mechanism and the power drive. The planting mechanism consist of cam, follower and the picker through which the seedling is planted. The feeding mechanism consist of a tray with chain conveyor attached to it for continuous feeding of the seedling. The chain conveyor also acts as storage for extra seedlings. The power drive consist of gear box, power wheel and chain sprockets for connecting different mechanism with each other. The gear box helps in changing plant to plant distances. All the mechanisms are connected with single power drive due to which their motion can be synchronized. Apart from the main parts blade for digging, wheels for support, press wheel for supporting seedlings after planting and handle for pulling the transplanter are designed. The developed design of the transplanter is unique as it has a provision for changing the inter-plant distance making it suitable for multi crops such as brinjal, tomato, chilly, etc. The transplanter can be moved in the field by framer manually for the ease of operation and the planting will be done automatically by the transplanter. The fabrication of the transplanter is done according to the design.