Seedling transplantation, a pivotal component in advancing the cultivation of vegetables and cash crops, significantly bolsters crops’ resilience against drought, cold, pests, and diseases, while substantially enhancing yields. The implementation of transplanting machinery not only remarkably alleviates the labor-intensive nature of transplantation but also elevates the precision and uniformity of the process, thereby facilitating mechanized plant protection and harvesting operations. This article summarizes the research status and development trends of mechanized field transplanting technology and equipment. It also analyzes and summarizes the types and current status of typical representative automatic seedling picking mechanisms. Based on the current research status, the challenges of mechanized transplanting technology were analyzed, mainly the following: insufficient integration of agricultural machinery and agronomy; the standards for each stage of transplanting are not perfect; the adaptability of existing transplanting machines is poor; the level of informatization and intelligence of equipment is low; the lack of innovation in key components, such as seedling picking and transplanting mechanisms; and the proposed solutions to address the issues. Corresponding solutions are proposed, such as the following: strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration; establishing standards for transplanting processes; enhancing transplanter adaptability; accelerating intelligentization and digitalization of transplanters; strengthening the theoretical framework; and performance optimization of transplanting mechanisms. Finally, the development direction of future fully automatic transplanting machines was discussed, including the following: improving the transplanting efficiency and quality of transplanting machines; integrating research and development of testing, planting, and seedling supplementation for transplanting machines; unmanned transplanting operations; and fostering collaborative industrial development.

As a core component of a fully automatic pepper transplanter, the performance of the seedling-picking mechanism is of particular significance. However, existing seedling-picking mechanisms have problems such as being prone to damaging the seedling roots and substrate, as well as having poor stability. To develop a highly efficient, stable, and minimally damaging seedling-picking mechanism, this study proposed a design scheme for a stem-clamping-and-pulling-out-type seedling-picking end actuator driven by a non-circular gear system. The specific methods and objectives include the following: (1) designing a differential non-circular gear system to replicate a manual picking trajectory accurately; (2) establishing a kinematic model and developing optimization software to determine the optimal parameter combination; (3) experimentally validating the mechanism’s performance through virtual simulations and bench tests. The bench tests showed that the mechanism could complete two seedling-picking operations per rotation, extracting an entire row (eight plants) in a single rotation at a speed of 30 r/min. The measured angles of the end effector at four key postures were highly consistent with simulation and high-speed camera data, with all key posture errors less than 1°. These results demonstrate the mechanism’s high accuracy, efficiency, and reliability.