Plant Propagation Robot: Hand Cuttings to ABB Arms

Many of the bedding plants, pot plants and grafted vegetable plants sold today began as a cutting, a graft or a tiny plantlet in a jar, and somebody had to handle each one of them. A plant propagation robot takes over some of that handling. This post looks at how growers propagated plants by hand, from rooting powders to tissue culture labs. It then covers the sticking, grafting and tissue culture machines in use now, including a grafting machine shown in Rotterdam in September 2026, where ABB robots could fit in, and the problems of cost, hygiene and skills that still slow the work down.

USDA technician Brandy Jones examines a rose plant that began as cells grown in tissue culture. Photo: Scott Bauer, USDA ARS via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How cuttings and tissue culture were done by hand

Taking cuttings is old garden practice. A grower cuts a shoot from a mother plant, strips the lower leaves and pushes it into a rooting medium, then keeps it warm and moist until roots form. For most of the 20th century commercial nurseries did this by hand on long benches, one cutting at a time. Chemistry made the rooting more reliable. In 1935 Percy Zimmerman and Frank Wilcoxon at the Boyce Thompson Institute reported that synthetic compounds, among them indolebutyric acid, made cuttings form roots, and rooting powders based on such compounds became a normal part of nursery work. The sticking itself stayed manual for decades.

A worker plants a locust root cutting by hand on the Natchez Trace Project in Tennessee, around 1942. Photo: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Tissue culture added a second, even more delicate kind of handwork. In 1902 the Austrian botanist Gottlieb Haberlandt proposed growing isolated plant cells outside the plant, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s Frederick Campion Steward at Cornell University pioneered micropropagation. In 1962 Toshio Murashige and Folke Skoog published a nutrient medium that labs still use widely. In micropropagation a worker at a sterile bench cuts small shoots from plantlets growing in jars and moves each piece onto fresh medium, again and again. Wikipedia's article on the method notes that mechanising it could cut labour costs but has proven difficult.

Plantlets growing in foil covered jars in the plant tissue culture lab of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Photo: Daderot / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Machines for cuttings arrived late. In 1998 Oglevee Ltd of Pennsylvania filed a US patent for automating the grading and sticking of vegetative cuttings. Commercial sticking machines followed. ISO Group in the Netherlands introduced the Cutting Planter 2500 in 2016, a robot that picks up cuttings and plants them into trays, and later added a transplanting mode and four types of gripper for anything from small tissue culture cuttings to woody cuttings. Visser's AutoStix went another way and sticks cuttings into biodegradable strips. In 2020 Greenhouse Grower wrote that leading ornamentals growers often name one of these machines as the technology that helped them most.

Rooted cuttings potted up on a small nursery bench in England. Photo: peganum / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Grafting machines and plantlet robots today

Grafting is the latest step to be automated. On 15 September 2026, at the Propagate! event at RDM Next in Rotterdam, which this year was about labour in propagation, Machinnova Group showed the SGA-CutClip, a machine that Flier Systems will sell internationally. It cuts and clips rootstocks for grafted fruiting vegetables. An operator puts in a tray, and the machine removes the top leaf, cuts the stem and places a clip plant by plant, without lifting the plants out. Flier gives a capacity of up to 5,000 plants an hour with one operator and says skilled grafting staff are hard to find.

Grafting a cucumber onto a Cucurbita ficifolia rootstock by hand, the job grafting machines now take over. Photo: Amada44 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Tissue culture is still the hardest part to automate, because plantlets are soft, irregular and have to stay sterile. Invetech built machines for the company Forbio that pick plantlets out of agar gel trays, use machine vision to find where to cut, and replant the sections in fresh trays. Invetech says each machine handles 12 explants per minute and that the machines raised production by 500% with the same labour, while also reducing contamination. Each crop needs its own rules for where to cut, though, so a machine like this is set up for a limited range of species.

Plant tissue culture in a lab, where clones of a plant are grown in jars by micropropagation. Photo: Angphotorion / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

We found no ABB robot working in a propagation line, so what follows is a possibility. The IRB 360 FlexPicker, guided by PickMaster vision, is made for fast picking of small, light items from a belt, much like a sorted stream of cuttings. A dual arm YuMi IRB 14000 or single arm YuMi IRB 14050 is sized for bench work, and ABB has shown YuMi handling pipettes in lab automation. The IRB 1300 comes in a Clean Room version, and Flexley Mover AMRs could move trays between benches. Our post on indoor vertical farming covers ABB robots further along the growing chain.

An ABB YuMi handles a pipette beside a lab technician, from ABB's material on robots for labs. Photo: ABB

What propagation robots need to solve next

Home gardeners will keep taking cuttings on the windowsill for a long time, because there is no consumer machine that does it. What they will notice is the effect on prices and choice: more plants started by robots in big propagation houses, with more even quality. Small gantry robots such as FarmBot already sow seeds and water them in home beds, and our plant care robot post looks at the machines that keep house plants alive. Taking a cutting means judging where a stem is healthy and where to cut, which is far harder than sowing a seed.

An ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot. Photo: ABB

For commercial greenhouses the first hurdle is money. A sticking or grafting machine is a big purchase for work that peaks for a few months a year, and every new variety may need its own settings or grippers. A blade that cuts thousands of plants can also carry disease from one plant to the next, which is why the CutClip cleans its cutting units after every tray. Where robots share benches with seasonal staff, collaborative arms such as ABB's GoFa CRB 15000, which stop when they sense contact, would make that arrangement easier to approve on safety grounds.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

Then there are the skills. ISO Group noted that operators who gain experience with its machines improve both speed and sticking quality, so the people running the robots still need a feel for plants. Growers will need staff who understand both a cutting and a vision system, and suppliers who can service machines quickly, which is why Flier built a camera into the CutClip for remote help. Integrators can also lay out a propagation cell and test its reach and cycle times in RobotStudio before any hardware arrives in the greenhouse.

The plant tissue culture centre of the Aegean Agricultural Research Institute in Izmir, Turkey. Photo: Shuhrataxmedov / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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