Commercial vegetable crop transplanters currently use several unsynchronised planting units mounted to a common transport frame. The objective of this work was to assess the performance of a new transplanting technology to improve the plant placement accuracy and spatiotemporal planting synchronization across adjacent rows, thus producing a grid-like planting pattern using adjacent vegetable crop transplanters. The feasibility of synchronisation of adjacent transplanting units for vegetable crops was demonstrated using tomato as the target crop. A colour, digital, high-speed computer vision analysis of the motion and dynamics of the plant trajectories of transplanted tomatoes was conducted. The high-speed video analysis led to the design and testing of an improved plant support mechanism to enhance the control and precision of the transplanting of vegetable crops. The absolute deviation values of the final location in the soil were reduced by approximately 25% for both the right planter and left planter compared to those in previous years. These results serve as the fundamental basis for a mechatronic system that can precisely transplant vegetable crops in a grid-like pattern across rows as a critical first step in a systematic approach to fully automated individual plant care.

商业蔬菜作物移植机目前使用几个不同步的种植单元，它们安装在一个共同的运输框架上。这项工作的目的是评估一种新的移植技术的性能，以提高相邻行之间的植株定位精度和时空种植同步性，从而使用相邻的蔬菜作物移植机产生网格状的种植模式。以番茄为目标作物，证明了蔬菜作物相邻移植单元同步的可行性。进行了彩色数字高速计算机视觉分析，分析了移植番茄植株运动的轨迹和动态。高速视频分析导致设计和测试了一种改进的植物支持机制，以增强对蔬菜作物移植的控制和精度。与往年相比，右播种机和左播种机在土壤中最终位置的绝对偏差值均降低了约25％。这些结果为机电一体化系统的基础奠定了基础，该机电一体化系统可以以网格状模式精确地跨行移植蔬菜作物，这是系统化的完全自动化个体植物护理方法中的关键第一步。