Open Source Farming Robot • Hacker News Board

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#191

Post by jredwards » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

deeviant wrote: post #133

Oh hey this is my industry (robots in agriculture). 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. R…

Yeah, but I'm not trying to save the world. I'm just trying to play with robots and eat tomatoes. If you're looking for something consequential, this isn't the right project.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#192

Post by clifdweller » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

spelunker wrote: post #106

mikepurvis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow backyard raised bed hipster, part of the point for me is going out and tending it. I struggle to see the value in this unless it’s about scaling.

Same - I enjoy working in my garden because it's a break from my office tech job! Robot aside, the UI to plan your planting is pretty great though.

I thought the same thing. I could care less about the robot but a good garden planning app would be nice and let you track when you water, plant, harvest/ yield of crop from year to year

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#193

Post by matthewfelgate » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

  * sudo apt install farmbot
  * farmbot --sew strawberries
  * farmbot --pick straweberries

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#194

Post by TaylorAlexander » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:18 PM UTC

deeviant wrote: post #185

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious what you think of our approach. Still early but the machine is outside in the fields and even on the shortest day of the year it traveled 20km on solar power. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27634450

I think that looks a lot more like the right direction. 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 accur…

That all makes sense, thank you.

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/

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#195

Post by diydsp » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #176

That video is so over the top it feels like a movie trailer for a summer blockbuster, complete with dramatic action music and the “take back control” slogan. Things like that make it harder to trust.

the popups in the bottom left announcing people purchasing them in the past are so distracting I couldn't watch this or trust it. Even the big travel websites shed that awful attempt at social proof.

They even give away their own game:

> or simply impress your friends and neighbors with a quick demo

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#196

Post by gpm » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

gpm wrote: post #189

dukeofdoom wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

great, thank you. I forwarded him your contact info.

I appreciate it :)

Just noticed HeyLaughingBoy's post too, from his description I'd say there's a pretty good chance his experience is more on point than mine (it is a bit hard to tell from the limited description here though).

Not to torpedo my chances, but you might want to forward his contact info on too.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#197

Post by gbrown » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

afrodc_ wrote: post #155

bluGill wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few advantages: the beds are raised do you don't have to bend over as far to tend them. The beds make it obvious where the place to walk is. The beds mean instead of rows of plants you have a contained solid mess which in turn means more plants per area (this is good for some plants, bad for others). Tilling is bad for soil and should be avoided whenever possible, the beds make it easier to not disturb th…

Why is tilling bad for the soil? Genuinely curious as I've seen it as an option for my terrible salty clay soil at my house.

It disrupts the fungal life and dries it out, while also increasing erosion and weed pressure. It’s not that you can’t ever till, but it’s generally to be avoided.

In the case of clay, deep mulch will do wonders, and the earthworms will gently improve the soil over time.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#198

Post by xgulfie » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

ducttapecrown wrote: post #157

swiftcoder wrote: post #111

I'm genuinely confused by this whole pitch. What practical problem does this solve? 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.

This solves the practical problem of having a single robot that can plant, weed and water a raised bed. Looking through their twitter posts linked on the website, they've good a bunch of happy users .

"having a robot" is not a problem statement

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#199

Post by lelandbatey » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #188

kortex wrote: post #34

I've built robots. I've built greenhouses. I like software and the occasional bit of farming. Thirs looks cute and fun, and I hope they iterate, but it's not really solving the right problems, and introduces its own. 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…

> 1 - there are no straight lines on a farm. 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 field…

Those rows are "straight" in a way that looks roughly right from up high, or from head height, but you can see the exact problem they're talking about in several of those pictures you linked; farms are "straight" to a few centimeters over a few tens of meters, but they're not "straight" down to sub-single centimeter deviation over 30 meters. And while it may be possible to have _some_ farms operate that way, how does this system interact with places where that won't work? What about places like the Palouse region of Washington, where you'll see farms stretching for tens of kilometers, but they have to do so over rolling hills[1]?

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...

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#200

Post by RyanGoosling » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

It's cool in a technical way, but is it practical? I think drip irrigation is more practical. Or other irrigation methods other than water over canopy.