A transplanting robot aiming at the new spiral culture column was developed. The electromagnet type and structure parameters of the double-needle electromagnet driven end effector were decided with geometrical and force-balance analyses. The coordinated motion simulations of plug tray seedling transplanting robot for column cultivation were carried out on a virtual prototype to find out the optimal structure parameters of the manipulator, the optimal layout of the system and the time sequence of coordinated motions of different components. And the flow diagram of coordinated motion was constructed. Tests of the real prototype indicate that the horizontal and vertical positioning errors of the manipulator are 2.24 and 0.63mm, respectively, and the success rate of transplanting achieves 94.7%. The working efficiency of transplanting to columns no higher than 1.2m achieves 750 hills per hour, and the seedling picking-up time is only 0.2s, which can meet the practical requirements of automatic transplanting of column cultivation.