Development of a novel automated micropropagation system for plant tissue culture

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Micropropagation is an advanced vegetative propagation technique for producing a large number of genetically uniform and pathogen-free transplants in a limited time and space. It is a plant tissue culture technique for growing plants from small pieces of tissue under sterile conditions in a laboratory on specially selected media. The benefits of plant tissue culture are extensive in the agricultural world in many respects, the first being that it allows for the production of huge numbers of plants in a very short period of time. Plant tissue culture is also advantageous to growers because the overwhelming number of disease free plants can be produced using the tissue collected from a single parent plant - a plant which itself remains unharmed in the tissue harvesting process. Propagation through tissue culture also eliminates the possibility of any interruption in the growing season because it can be carried out inside the carefully regulated controlled environment. However, plant tissue culture or micropropagation is a capital-intensive industry, and in some cases the unit cost per plant becomes unaffordable. Due to the increased cost of labour in the developed countries, the conventional micropropagation system has been challenged by high production cost and low gross profit. In general, many micropropagation companies in high cost labor areas have had to either automate their system to reduce labour requirements or move operations to low labour cost area to reduce their production cost. The main objective of this project is to development an automated micropropagation system capable of handling plant tissue cultures. Robotic technologies developed in the automotive industry are starting to drive innovation in horticulture for the goal of improving productivity and reducing labour costs. The main challenge of automating the micropropagation process lies in the required fine manipulation of fragile micro-shoots (e.g., of blueberry stocks). However, the capability of automation systems has dramatically increased over the last decade with new sensing and actuation technologies, allowing us to address this challenge and propose an automated micropropagation solution that can boost efficiencies and reduce labour costs of tissue culturing.