Development of a novel automated micropropagation system for plant tissue culture

微繁繁殖是一种先进的无性繁殖技术，可以在有限的时间和空间内产生大量遗传均匀、无病原体的移植物。它是一种植物组织培养技术，在实验室无菌条件下，在特殊选择的培养基上从小块组织中培养植物。植物组织培养在农业世界的许多方面都有广泛的好处，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，因为绝大多数的无病植物可以使用从单一亲本植物收集的组织来生产-植物本身在组织收获过程中没有受到伤害。通过组织培养繁殖也消除了生长季节中断的可能性，因为它可以在精心调节的受控环境中进行。然而，植物组织培养或增殖是一项资本密集型产业，在某些情况下，每株植物的单位成本变得难以承受。由于发达国家劳动力成本的增加，传统的微繁系统面临着生产成本高、毛利低的挑战。一般来说，许多高成本劳动力地区的微繁殖公司不得不将其系统自动化以减少劳动力需求或将业务转移到低劳动力成本地区以降低生产成本。

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.