Development and first tests of an automatic system for commercial vine cutting transplanters based on dgps-rtk technology

The aim of this paper is the proposal of an innovative system for commercial transplanter to allow the automatic point-laying location of each vine cutting, without any kind of field preliminary squaring. A DGPS-RTK system is able to calculate the vine cutting location according to the project values; the transplant operation, carried out by electro-hydraulic and electro-mechanical components, is completely automated. The goal is to increase the work rate of the transplanting equipment and reduce the necessary skilled labour, without losing the accuracy of the vineyard planting.