Development of a novel automated micropropagation system for plant tissue culture

微繁殖技术是一种先进的无性繁殖技术，可在有限的时间和空间内获得大量遗传均一、无病原菌的植株。它是一种植物组织培养技术，用于在实验室中在无菌条件下在特别选择的培养基上从小块组织中生长植物。植物组织培养的好处在农业世界的许多方面是广泛的，首先是它允许在很短的时间内生产大量的植物。植物组织培养对种植者也是有利的，因为可以使用从单一亲本植物收集的组织产生绝大多数的无病植物-在组织收获过程中本身保持不受伤害的植物。通过组织培养进行繁殖也消除了生长季节任何中断的可能性，因为它可以在精心调节的受控环境中进行。然而，植物组织培养或微繁殖是资本密集型产业，并且在某些情况下，每株植物的单位成本变得负担不起。由于发达国家劳动力成本的增加，传统的微繁殖系统受到生产成本高和毛利低的挑战。一般来说，在高劳动力成本地区的许多微繁殖公司不得不使其系统自动化以减少劳动力需求，或者将操作转移到低劳动力成本地区以降低其生产成本。本计画的主要目的是发展一套能处理植物组织培养物的自动化微繁殖系统。汽车行业开发的机器人技术开始推动园艺创新，以提高生产力和降低劳动力成本。使微繁殖过程自动化的主要挑战在于需要对脆弱的微芽（例如，蓝莓（blueberry）然而，在过去的十年中，自动化系统的能力随着新的传感和驱动技术的出现而急剧增加，使我们能够应对这一挑战，并提出一种自动化微繁殖解决方案，可以提高效率并降低组织培养的劳动力成本。

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.