Open Source Farming Robot(farm.bot) |
Open Source Farming Robot(farm.bot) |
They even give away their own game:
> or simply impress your friends and neighbors with a quick demo
I'd love something like this, and with a refillable water tank.
Cool stuff.
* sudo apt install farmbot
* farmbot --sew strawberries
* farmbot --pick straweberriesAlso there's no scrollbar at all, that's super silly.
1 - there are no straight lines on a farm. Maybe in a hydro setup built on concrete slab, in which case, why robot?
2 - needs a way to cover more ground. If it's not able to travel linearly indefinitely in one direction along a bed, there's no way to scale.
3 - grit. Precision CnC mechanisms and dirt do not mix. You can't keep farm things clean (unless hydro, and even then, things get wet and caked with fertilizer salt)
Ditch the linear ways for something like bike tires. There's an open source solar farm robot which rolls around weeding (can't find at the moment, maybe was a video). Not limited by a box. They need robust mechanisms which can stand up to farm abuse and are easy to service, grease, and replace (unless you hermetically seal the components, which is harder than it sounds).
Weeds are actually pretty easy to manage.
If someone wants to make an impact in the farm tech space, come up with a cheaper alternative for scooping and dumping dirt. A ride-on tractor can be had used for $500-800. But as soon as you start talking loaders, it's $2-3000 used, and tens of thousands for new. Also the smallest tend to be a 4 foot wide bucket and a few hundred pounds lift. I want something half or a quarter of that. Able to scoop 50 lbs of dirt, repeatedly, and dig holes/trenches. That would have a massive impact in agrarian communities around the world.
As someone who went through endurance sports, being the fix-it guy, and a CS program I always sort of had one foot in both worlds and didn't really engage in this kind of rhetoric.
But as I've been accumulating more woodworking tools and getting a lot of dirt under my nails building a giant garden, I'm starting to see their point.
This device is going to gum up, being exposed to UV all day, dust, wind, and rain. The tolerances on this device are way tighter than any in situ environment is going to allow. And you're going to kneel on that track and it's gonna hurt like a motherfucker.
This will be like a pet turtle you have to keep flipping right side up, not like a roomba.
Having recently bought (and returned) the flagship Roomba, I struggle to see the difference between those two.
You say that like this device hasn't been around for years, accumulating revisions, upgrades, and user stories.
As a small hipster raised bed farmer (or rather, gardener), I actually looked into this at one point - the $1500 price tag put me off of it really quick. There's no way that kind of investment makes sense unless you're planning to sell the vegetables to recoup your investment - and it's doubtful that the machine will realistically last more than five years or so, so you'll have to replace it at some point in the fairly near future.
iRobot founders' new thing. Small, and undercapitalized, but promising.
I think it might have been this one, Acorn by Twisted Fields:
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...
I'm not sure what you mean, to me this sounds like "everybody knows that birds can't fly". But I might just be totally misunderstanding you.
Do you mean "there are no straight lines on farms near where I live"? Cause, well, half my relatives are farmers and their farms are very much made up of straight lines.
For context, here's a google image search for Dutch potato fields: https://www.google.com/search?q=aardappelveld&source=lnms&tb...
Large, flat, level areas aren't that common, while major-to-minor deviations from flat-and-level are very common. The grandparent comment is I believe rightly asking "how does this 'farm bot' solve the problems of real farms?" I agree, this looks less like a farm-bot and more like a "serious gardener bot", which is a different niche.
[1] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palouse_hills_northe...
https://www.toro.com/en/professional-contractor/compact-util...
Here’s a nice overview of a no-dig farm: https://youtu.be/u79tiVcj8bY
The simple AB line served the agricultural guidance industry (think GPS) for many years before systems capable of handling complex curves arrived on the market.
Also their approach is great if you have a metal shop and lots of raw materials and components ready to go, but for their goal of helping mechanized developing countries, I think it falls flat. The first rule of pricing hardware is economy of scale wins. Being able to fabricobble a farm tractor from a Toyota pickup is way more valuable than building one from scratch using steel box beams.
I think their approach would be better served by creating an "API standard" for mechanical interfaces, like an ISO standard of sorts, so you could fabricobble your prime mover, your bucket loader, your hydraulics, from whatever you happen to have, and be able to swap out with anyone else's peripheral. Like the IDDS, but more down to Earth :) :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Docking_System_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spidercam
Where it can be suspended above the field and moved to any point above the plant and can be raised as crops grow?
I don't like this. It feels way too "Juicero" to me. Too cute, to inconsequential. It feels likely one would spend more time on building and maintaining this thing than work it actually saves and a significant amount the benefit of having a garden is working it with you hands and watching that work grow in fruition.
Bots in the farm though, they are the real deal. Reducing herbicide use by 80% or more, allowing the use of non-GMO crop while maintaining strong weed control and healthy crop, treating and optimizing every individual plant in a field, all things that will happen in the next 10 years due to robotics in the farm.
I think a few commenters are missing the point of this project. It's not a commercial robot and it's not meant to mass produce food. It seems maybe the use the word "farm" is being taken too literally. Their four stated applications are:
1. Education
2. Home use
3. Research
4. Accessibility
This is the description from their white paper [0]:
> The vision of this project is to create an open and accessible technology aiding everyone to grow food and to grow food for everyone. The mission is to grow a community that produces free and open-source hardware plans, software, data, and documentation enabling everyone to build and operate a farming machine.
Anyone who has done it knows if you have irrigation sorted there is very little needed for seedlings to grow to full size. Even with no irrigation we’re only talking 5mins watering on dry days.
Adding all this electronics and metal to an otherwise organic and natural process is environmentally, economically and spiritually detrimental.
Metals (although in tiny portions) are part of ourselves but plastics are not.
Planting seeds in a bed that size is at most an hour or two of work. Raised beds don't suffer from that many weeds, so weeding is a couple of hours per week at most. And drip irrigation with a timer can be had for a few dollars.
How much produce is produced?
How much time spent cleaning, repairing, or otherwise keeping it running
What preventive maintenance is required?
i.e., other than a learning tool, if you just consider the small garden users, what's the return?
If this robot allows people with little time to grow vegetables in their backyard, you can argue that they will move closer to soil rather than further...
The reason people don’t do it is that commercial farming is so efficient once you factor in costs growing your own is not cheaper than buying from supermarket.
I suspect this varies by location and demographics. Being an older guy living in rural areas, almost everyone I know grows at least some veggies and fruit. Not everyone makes it a major part of their lives, but I'd be hard-pressed to find almost anyone I know who doesn't have at least a couple tomato plants, or some berry bushes.
Avoid overhead watering with automatic sprinkler systems. Those systems are designed for large areas (like lawns) that need a broad application of water, not your Square Foot Garden that’s designed to take up little space. The overhead spray never gets to the root zone beneath your plants’ leaves, so the watering winds up being insufficient. That overhead spray also quickly evaporates, leading to water waste, and leaves foliage wet which can lead to pest and disease issues.
https://squarefootgardening.org/2020/05/watering-methods-for...
I do this kind of small consulting (firmware/hardware design & integration, etc.) on the side from my day job. I find that the biggest problem is discovery. There are many individuals and small businesses out there that need simple control systems built, but the only firms they can find are the ones with lots of marketing but they're too big to care about a 20-hour project.
If your friend still has this need, my contact info is in my profile. I'm in the US and happy to help.
"My dad, who I copied on this email had a quick question regarding hiring a programmer to write a small program for a farm equipment control system" is what I responded to.
They would be better served focusing on this as an accessibility device, allowing people to garden who do not have the physical capability to otherwise do so.
But if Homelab + Dirt = awesome to you, more power to you.
Some of the complaints about linear garden beds is just not valid. Different crops can definitely be linear, even grid-like. This idea can be scaled up with increasing complexity as needed.
It will be interesting to see where this kind of idea goes as the projects themselves itself grow up.
I really can't see the value add from adding a CNC machine to each raised bed.
Drip irrigation for watering and fertilizing comes to mind, which really is a better solution and prevents the need to water directly onto the leaves of the plant, which is a huge no-no to a lot of plants.
It would need a position and feedback system outside of the current "servo and home position" method, because even with closed loop motors, the distance traversed isn't exact. We need a cheap, easy way to get accurate-ish absolute position (1-3cm), maybe acoustics and phase-based?
The smallest kit is $1500 USD.
The watering seems like the actual place where time could be saved but that could be accomplished with a basic automatic sprinkler.
I do believe this won't necessarily save someone time. It probably just turns two hours of vegetable gardening per week into one hour of vegetable gardening plus one hour of robot gardening. I believe there are enough people in the world who enjoy gardening their mechatronics for this to have a respectable future, but I agree that it will never compete with any commercial venture
... unless someone invents an OpenCV saffron stigma identifier.
Even better: a slug-hunting robot powered by fermented slugs:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/tmp/slugbot.html
The project is from circa-2000, I remember being impressed by the idea at the time, and I'd have thought slug-hunting robots would be more of a common thing by now - turns out robotics for agriculture are hard.
Isn’t that called a duck?
your slugs now shoot lasers
Props for trying though.
I’ve had a similar idea before, for roaches, but I’m just not sure how it could work. Surely any laser with enough power output to kill something would cause a decent amount of collateral as well?
I hate mosquitos as much as slugs - but I do not like people to loose their eyesight over it.
There would have to be many reliable savety mechanism, before this can become a thing.
Otherwise I will have trained one, to target ticks as well.
That way you'd be performing target recognition from multiple angles and mis-classifications would tend to only result in the not-slug being hit with 10-20% power.
Btw, did I see the robot harvesting in the end? Everything else is fine, but at least this don't take away from me! :>
I would say that the precision part of Ag robotics is the most important part and the success of this project is likely going to be resting on that entirely.
It boils down to something like:
1. Can you sense and classify (i.e. Deep learning based vision)
2. After that, can you turn a pixel into field coordinates. (Pose-> gps/encoder/imu/etc)
3. Can you act accurately/quick/effectively enough (kill/treat mechanism, electromechnical design)
Then it's can you do it reliably enough. Then it's can you do it fast enough. Then its can you do it cost effectively enough.
Farmers won't mess with anything not reliable. They generally aren't interested in anything with worse performance than existing processes, even if greener/cheaper (unless they are significantly so). They most especially will not mess with anything that doesn't generate value in their eyes and they are very good at understanding what generates value and what doesn't.
Perhaps cooled coils: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator
Wind power to shake the water off
Obligatory: Any opinions I express on HN are my own and not representative of my employer.
And you can’t make a robot only out of aluminum, steel, and ABS plastic. Cmon, you know better than that. All it takes is failure of one of the parts they conveniently did not mention and you have an expensive doorstop.
There are untold number of videos out there that complain about lack of sufficient grommets and conduits for vehicle trailers, resulting in predictable shorts circuits. You’d like to think these are all solved problems, but they aren’t staying solved.
I just published a new article to go with our latest video. This one takes a closer look at the vehicle subsystems.
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/a-closer-look-at-acorn...
Edit: just submitted it as an article on HN if anyone wants to give it their vote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27634450
"At home Grow food for yourself, your family, and your community by installing FarmBot on a raised bed, urban rooftop, or in a small greenhouse at home. Fully automated, hyper-local food production has never been so attainable."
This is the antithesis of commercial farming.
Here's some pictures[0] of people building larger scale ones:
- 10x20' inside a greenhouse
- 1.5x18m outdoor
[0] - https://forum.farmbot.org/t/photo-contest-post-your-best-far...
It is if what you want is a robot.
Personally I’ve been really pushing for “community supported development”, where a community crowd funds an idea. Like the Godot video game engine or Octoprint. We’re applying to non profit fiscal hosts now. (I expect we may fork the project and have a for profit version in the future, but I’m all about maintaining a complete open source system as a non profit project. See the Dronecode foundation for an example of a split profit/non-profit project.)
I want to have a robot for myself and for others that can manage a one to five acre plot using high volume organic production along the lines of methods popularized by Eliot Coleman, JM Fortier, or Charles Dowding. I’m leaning towards no-dig (Dowding) but it will take a lot of experimentation to see what really works best.
But I say all this because I think a lot of companies are going to be focused on meeting market demand for existing farming needs. I’m hoping that for our non profit work we are pushing the envelope for highly ecological development, supported by enthusiastic believers in our mission. I’ve been learning about reduced till and no till agriculture and it seems super promising for a robot like ours. My hope is that long term, we can help build a system that allows these techniques to scale.
That said, the need for a precision vision system is even greater in this scenario. There’s going to be a lot of variety in what our system needs to identify and do! Luckily vision is the thing I really enjoy learning. I think if I can drive prototyping and I can get a broader community going, we have a good shot of getting a whole system going. At the very least I think our open source vehicle is very good, and will be a solid base platform for people once we release the V2 research vehicle.
See my vision learning project I’ve been working on the last couple years: https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/
For all the other types of pest, you really don't want to be automatically spraying that, you're one software bug away from having a very bad day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyOIRVjatdg
That's actually quite clever! Though I'm not sure how they avoid the gutters from turning into algae blooming, mosquito-breeding cesspools. :p
Edit: Oh I guess you can just cover the gutter in plastic and ensure there is enough water throughput to stay fairly fresh: https://permaculturefoodforest.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/rain...
I'd love to get something like this into my apartment, around 0.5x1 meters in size, and with a refillable water tank.
When it's cold, you water in the morning. When it's hot, you water at night.
Leaves absorb water, too, fwiw.
this seems like its definitely not a project yet for people who don’t enjoy that as a hobby.
A lot of people prefer spending half an hour a day learning italian, or rock climbing, or whatever...
Some stuff is easier to grow, some is harder, but for example I barely did anything on my strawberry patch this year other than picking them when they got ripe. I'd say I spent maybe 15 minutes a month on the strawberries.
Now if you're trying to grow a lot of stuff then the time investment might increase but most backyard gardens don't take up that much time once you've planted everything.
Robot might help in a greenhouse setting but outdoors it's just gonna get mudded up and get fine, abrasive clay dust in everything. Needs to be way more ruggedized.
If contract work isn't against the rules for them (not sure), and the job is otherwise reasonable (feasible, not too open ended, not throwing up giant red flags) I bet he would get some bites by posting to the monthly "who is hiring" threads too.
Depending on the details of the request I might be willing to do it, more because I think it might be interesting to work on a "farm equipment control system" than anything else. Coincidentally I gave notice at my job a week ago so I'll have some free time coming up.
But actually, if most people weren't so averse to biological organisms, perhaps we would've had computer controlled ducks, rats, hens and other small animals by now.
Why bother reinventing the whole thing when you could just replace (part of) their brains.
Experimentation would be pretty gruesome though.
Seriously. If you've ever watched utility crews installing or repairing underground fiber, and then had moles colonize your yard, there is only one logical conclusion: silly humans, you are doing it wrong.
I've brought near-dead piglets seemingly back to good health by giving them a spoonful of rich compost, almost certain to be teaming with e-coli among all sorts of other microbes considered to be pathogenic.
>Animal poop is full of it, and we don't want that in our food supply.
Animal poop is already in our commercial food supply, especially vegetables as you alluded to. Hell, quite a lot of rat and mice meat is allowed in our commercial meats here in the US.
>Machines don't leave e-coli behind to contaminate our food like biological organisms do.
No, instead machines leave behind oil, gas, coolant residues to contaminate our food and soils.
E-coli is only a problem if you don't embed yourself and your gut with as many other strains of various microbes as you possibly can. If you're HIV positive or immunocompromised, then for sure, wash your fresh food and everything else you ingest, for everybody else, don't worry about e-coli.
oh right, humans can't be property
I agree oil from machines isn't something you want either.
Nothing magical about it, there are some advantages to raised beds, but other than the ergonomics everything can be done in any other type of garden if you try.
On a different note, tilling also costs large amounts of energy. The less tilling your do, the less CO2 you are putting into the atmosphere (even if you do the tilling by hand with a shovel you are still emitting more CO2 than if you just sat in your easy-chair)
In the case of clay, deep mulch will do wonders, and the earthworms will gently improve the soil over time.
Raised bed, you know what you get.
Not to torpedo my chances, but you might want to forward his contact info on too.
Does this still apply when talking about farming? I just started growing food this year, but once I've harvested the first crop and am planting the second crop of the season, the roots in the ground are surely going to break down quickly in any case, because I've harvested all of their tops, no?
>even if you do the tilling by hand with a shovel you are still emitting more CO2 than if you just sat in your easy-chair
I'm sorry, what? By that logic I should also never exercise.
I think many farmers have moved towards using various types of something called “cover crops” rather than tilling. These cover crops have different impacts depending on which are used: some have incredibly prolific rooting systems that dig deep and break up the soil on their own; some pull nutrients from deep in the soil and grow massive green above ground so farmers let these grow to pre-seed levels and then plow it over, and leave it so it decomposes and re-releases those same nutrients to the surface, and also draws all the micro biome critters in which then fertilize the soil even more; some plants fix nitrogen levels and some bloom various types of flowers which pull in pollinators. Some do a premise mix of multiple types of cover crops.
I think tilling is still done sometimes but it’s only for certain situations but is avoided most of the time these days.
I just got into gardening a few years ago, so I’m still learning most of this as I go along, but from what i’ve read, tilling is phased out except for certain situations.
I can say with absolute certainty that by my third year of working on soil, my gardens soil absolutely does not need tilling at all, it’s fluffy and soft for at least two feet down with plenty of life in there. But much of the surrounding area is pretty clay tough. Honestly it was super easy, just needed like a season of building the soil properly.
Another Ive noticed is, many of our home/hobby gardening techniques which our parents generation adopted were really only useful for enormous factory level farms and were actually not good for small or home gardens. These two situations need entirely different things but marketing and such over the years really steered that generation into doing a lot of the wrong things.
I don’t know your situation, tilling may be the best option for you, but it also may be to just dump a bunch of compost on top, let it settle, then plant some rooting cover crops and let it do it’s thing for a couple months. The latter may be much much healthier for your soil.
I was hoping you would notice the exercise connection. I don't have answers to that, just an interesting consideration.
For those of us who sling CRUD sites all day long, the opportunity to dig into more machine/computer interaction is just fun.
Observe: "Using the manual controls, you can move FarmBot and operate its tools and peripherals in real-time. Scare birds away while at work, take photos of your veggies, turn the lights on for a night time harvest, or simply impress your friends and neighbors with a quick demo."
Robot aside, the UI to plan your planting is pretty great though.
Drip hoses are also better from a water consumption point of view since it goes straight to the soil— you don't lose any to runoff or evaporation.
Also, don't forget the weeds. Almost all of the plants humans label as weeds, have very deep sub-soil penetrating roots (most are also more nutritious than the stuff we've bred for us or other animals to eat). If you want to rebuild your soil, let the weeds grow and then either use them for compost which you'll later top-dress your soil with, or just chop them and leave them be for the cover crop effect, or work them in slightly, up to you.
This has been my primary approach. Letting the grass and "weeds" grow relatively tall then trimming them down every month or so, letting the clippings rest where they are more or less.
If you have a new house, developments are horible, just enough soil to grow grass. You might be stuck buying good compost and soil and tilling that in deep, then letting grass grow for a few years before trying anything more.
Also, try asking a coffee shop for leftover ground and sprinkle it around...
Also thanks for the recommendation of using coffee grounds. I have a couple local shops nearby I think would be willing to offload that on to me haha.
The word you’re looking for is “naturalized”. Not native, but they’re already there, so...
