Abstract: To address the problems of low efficiency and high labor intensity of the existing semi-automatic pepper transplanter, an automatic seedling taking and dropping device was designed. The device was composed of seedling clamping parts, a translation mechanism and vertical movement mechanism, a control system, a hole tray frame, and other components. The control system drove the translation and vertical moving mechanisms, which in turn drove the seedling clamping parts and the hole plate to produce joint movement, respectively. This process enabled the seedling clamping parts to pull out the chili seedlings from the hole sequentially, and then move them to the top of the seedling guide tube to drop them, completing the whole process of seedling taking and dropping. The seedlings were raised with 72-hole trays, and the 55-day-old chili plug seedlings were selected as the research object. A total of 360 chili plug seedlings were transplanted in 5 trays at the rate of 15 plants per minute. The experiment results showed that the success rate of seedling extraction was 96.39%, the success rate of seedling infusion was 98.27%, and the stem and leaf damage rate was 7.79%. This study can provide a reference for the design of automatic transplanters.