China has become the world's largest vegetable producer.At present, plug seedlings in vegetable production have been widely used in China, but it is regretful that seedling transplantation with the increasing of production and income is still at the manual level despite of semi-automatic transplanters in marketing promotion.The semi-automatic transplanter can plant seedlings into the ground, but it needs hand-fed seedlings, which still consumes some labors.Long-term continuous operation is also unfeasible because of operators' work fatigue.Overall,seedling transplantation is still labor-intensive, inefficient, and not implemented in time.It often leads to non-uniform plant distribution.Besides, the shortage of skilled labors and the increase of labor cost have strongly demanded China and other countries to develop fully automatic transplanters that allow for high-speed operation and labor saving.Based on the cultural practice for vegetable transplanting in China, a new combined pick-up device for automatic transplantling of vegetable plug seedlings is developed and evaluated in a laboratory.The device is made up of a path manipulator and a pick-up end-effector.The device can move the pins slowly to extract seedlings from the tray cells and return quickly to the pick-up point for the next extraction.The path manipulator which looks like a robot arm is Ⅰ series combined mechanism comprised of cam mechanism with an oscillating follower, rocker mechanism, and slider crank mechanism.The motion of cam mechanism is transited by rocker mechanism to the slider which moves along a fixed slot of combined straight-line and circular paths.The end-effector equated with a robot hand is fixed on the slider.The end-effector is a pincette-type mechanism using the pick-up pins to penetrate into the root mass for seedling extraction.The dynamic analysis of the designed seedling pick-up device was simulated with ADAMS software, which is used to optimize design of the device and determine the points of picking and releasing.When the slider moves along the straight-line path of the slot, the end-effector picks up a seedling from a cell.When the slider moves along the circular paths, the end-effector transfers the seedling to a hopper which guides the seedling into a transplanting device.Although the working speed was about the speed of hand placement, it was intended at the beginning of the study to concentrate many efforts on making the extracting function of the seedling pick-up device more accurate.Thereby, this transplanting operation requires that the pick-up device can reliably pick up the plugs without any damage to leaves, the stem and the root mass.Being the first prototype, various performance tests under local production conditions were conducted to find out the optimal machine operation parameters and transplant production conditions.As the end-effector with multiple fine pins was moved by the swing pick-up device, it can effectively complete the transplanting work cycle of extracting,transferring, and discharging a seedling.With cucumber and pepper plug seedlings as objects of the research, performance of the device is tested.Using 20-day-old cucumber plug seedlings with the device picking 35 seedlings per minute, the success ratio is 91.74% and a seedling damaging ratio is 4.96%.However, the device picks 45 seedlings per minute with a success ratio of 95.83% and a seedling damaging ratio of 1.67% using 48-day-old pepper plug seedlings.The result shows that it is easier to transplant pepper plug seedlings than cucumber plug seedlings.The quality of extracting seedlings was satisfactory.