Abstract—Plant nursery is a prosperous business in Indonesia, high demand of ornamental plant leads this business to keep expanding. As another agricultural business, a plant nursery is labor intensive business. Labor problem such as increasing minimum wage, labor scarcity, and low productivity becomes main issue in recent years. Automation has been known as suitable solution for solving labor problems in manufacturing sector. Therefore, implementing automation to assist nursery production might solve nursery labor problem. In this research a semi-automatic bagging machine is designed to reduce the labor required and production lead time during re-planting process. Observation and interview is conducted at one plant nursery for collecting user requirements. Collected user requirements, then transformed to engineering specification using house of quality matrix. Machine conceptual design is created by analyzing the current practice of re-planting and identify the function with function structure diagram. Identified function, then inserted into the morphological matrix in order to generate possible solutions for automating the function. One concept is selected to further develop into detail design. Selected machine concept is using compressed air to fill plant container with media and compress the media. This machine is capable to reduce production lead time up to half of current production process by utilizing one operator.

 

Index Terms—plant nursery, labor, automation, machine design

Cite: Dian Yulianto and Soranat Raibhu, "Design of Semi-automatic Plant Media Bagging Machine for Container Plant Nursery," Journal of Advanced Agricultural Technologies, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 36-40, March 2018. Doi: 10.18178/joaat.5.1.36-40