Development of an Automatic Pallet Handling System for Seeded Trays

The objective of this study was to develop an automatic pallet loading and unloading system for rice seeded trays, that receives three seeded trays in a stack from an automatic sowing line and arranges them orderly on a pallet. The loaded pallets will then be shipped out to a conditioning room for sprouting. The system can also reverse the former procedures to retrieve sprouted trays from pallets and arrange the trays to be sent to the nursery field, where the seeds in the tray keep growing to the seedling stage. A prototype was designed, constructed and subjected to performance testing and evaluation. Experimental results showed that the system worked satisfactorily at stacking 1416 trays h−1, with 95% pallet loading success rate. The unloading capacity was 1380 trays h−1, with 97·2% success rate.