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Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

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Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#231

Post by gumby »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #223
gumby wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if in a large farm it will be worth running hoses and deploying a frob next to each device vs having an electric robot with a refillable tank walking the rows. Such a robot is still SF today, so deploying a frob with each seedling would be the only choice at the moment (or continue current irrigation practices). The frobs have to be cheap enough to be consumables.

My gut tells me that the robot will cost less in the long run. It also doesn't seem like a hard problem (yeah, easy to say) since row crops are planted at fixed spacings and detecting that the thing next you is a plant and not a rabbit should not be a difficult task. The combination of GPS mapping (planter knows where it was during planting), known plant & row spacing, and basic visual imaging should simplify the pro…

> The combination of GPS mapping (planter knows where it was during planting), known plant & row spacing...

This is not robust. Humans don't use GPS for this purpose (and anyway, the plants are closer than GPS resolution.

Looking and using the local data is the more robust approach. Trying to assume the real world is the same as your model has been the source of countless visual gags since the advent of movies.

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#232

Post by bell-cot »

hondo77 wrote: post #229
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gut tells me that the robot will cost less in the long run. It also doesn't seem like a hard problem (yeah, easy to say) since row crops are planted at fixed spacings and detecting that the thing next you is a plant and not a rabbit should not be a difficult task. The combination of GPS mapping (planter knows where it was during planting), known plant & row spacing, and basic visual imaging should simplify the pro…

Scale, I imagine. Orchards are big . How many robot waterers would you need when you have to spend time at each individual tree (or groups of trees) to water it/them? How far is it to the nearest refill? Put another way, drip is massively parallel. Robot waterers, not so much.

Let's say the RoboWater(tm) rolls down a row of trees in the orchard, water hose unreeling behind it. At each tree, it dumps the calculated dose of water into a clay pot that is sunken into the ground near the trunk (from which the water slowly soaks into the soil). When the row is done - it reverses direction, reeling the hose back up in the process. Then some side-shuffling, and it's soon rolling down the next row of trees in the orchard, again dumping the calculated dose of water...

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#233

Post by krisoft »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #230
hondo77 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale, I imagine. Orchards are big . How many robot waterers would you need when you have to spend time at each individual tree (or groups of trees) to water it/them? How far is it to the nearest refill? Put another way, drip is massively parallel. Robot waterers, not so much.

Oh, I wasn't thinking orchards. I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses.

> I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses.

Are we talking about irrigation pivots[1] here? Because those are a known technology.

If we are thinking about robots driving up and down the rows and watering plants from a tank, and then returning to some central location to re-fill their tank that feels like a "carrying water for elephants" situation. I suspect the logistics won't work out. Could try to run some numbers on it of course. Is that how you are thinking about it?

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j1lMs7fcIQ

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#234

Post by gumby »

tomhoward wrote: post #227
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BLE mesh and solar power should get your BoM cost below $20, but I don't see any way that you're going to hit a sub $1 price point. Assuming your mesh can cover the entire field (reasonable if you have one monitoring point every few plants), you can have one or a small handful of LTE-M basestation points to handle the data uplinks. It's an interesting problem and I am sure reference designs already exist. Maybe talk…

Yeah I think that's right. It's a matter of trading off the water cost savings (and produce quality/yield gains) per plant vs unit cost per device, to determine the optimal density of devices. As I said in the previous comment, right now, high-value crop growers like wine grape growers pay $700-$1000 or more per site (including reader/comms module and sensors), and generally only install one monitoring point per bloc…

There's (relatively) lots of water in the Barossa Valley and it's worth growing a thirsty high value crop like grapes there. And even there the cost structure you say is unsupportable.

But the economics of farming in the Eyre Peninsula is quite different and they really have a water problem. From a food PoV these are the people we really need to help.

(I have family in both, not to mention in laws in Germany who also have a water problem...getting rid of it!)

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#235

Post by unregistereddev »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #230
hondo77 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale, I imagine. Orchards are big . How many robot waterers would you need when you have to spend time at each individual tree (or groups of trees) to water it/them? How far is it to the nearest refill? Put another way, drip is massively parallel. Robot waterers, not so much.

Oh, I wasn't thinking orchards. I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses.

Row crops can be (and already are) irrigated with hoses. In dry areas of the world, drip tape is buried throughout the entire field because it allows farmers to make more efficient use of the water available to them. It does require the machinery has auto-steer (which is standard practice now anyway), because tearing up the drip tape with a planter is an expensive mistake.

https://whyfarmit.com/drip-tape-irrigation/

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#236

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

gumby wrote: post #32

This is so great. My long term dream is that robotics take over farming, individually plucking each weed or weevil, and metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant, so that all the crops are organic. Most of the chemicals (yes, including nitrogen fertilizers) offset labor, so when the labor is free we shouldn’t need them. And people won’t have to spend their lives in stoop-back work or exposed t…

> so when the labor is free we shouldn’t need them.

Short of the singularity happening - "labor" (even Robotic) - at this scale - is not going to be anywhere near free.

I mean, in some ways, "labor" is already "free" in agriculture if you compare current cost of labor per yield vs what you would get before the industrial revolution.

The average labor cost to farm an acre of wheat pre-industrial revolution was 50-100 hours. Today, it's Short of the singularity, we are not getting a 100x improvement from here in our lifetime.

There's not only so many 100x improvements you can make until you need a perpetual motion machine traveling faster than light...

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#237

Post by fragmede »

tomhoward wrote: post #219
gumby wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another comment I wrote that you probably need a BOM less than $0.50. At that price you don’t have a massive OS like Linux, you need something embedded that can run in a few KB. But a bunch of small devices can be managed by a huge device running Linux — maybe even something as expensive as a Raspberry Pi. (Apart from some time trying to sell in the Ag sector I spent a lot of time on embedded devices)

Well I already have a firmware version that can run in a few KB, which my father developed in Motorola assembly and that ran most of the soil moisture monitoring devices sold to the big-volume wine grape producers in Australia (mostly in Riverland SA supplying Treasury etc) from the late 90s till about 2010, after which newer products using Zigbee and cellular IoT took over (though we worked together on our own newer…

Can you use mesh networking? A solar panel and an Esp32, with mesh networking might be cheaper than an LTE module on each device, at the cost of needing more devices.

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#238

Post by kaveh_h »

tomhoward wrote: post #219
gumby wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another comment I wrote that you probably need a BOM less than $0.50. At that price you don’t have a massive OS like Linux, you need something embedded that can run in a few KB. But a bunch of small devices can be managed by a huge device running Linux — maybe even something as expensive as a Raspberry Pi. (Apart from some time trying to sell in the Ag sector I spent a lot of time on embedded devices)

Well I already have a firmware version that can run in a few KB, which my father developed in Motorola assembly and that ran most of the soil moisture monitoring devices sold to the big-volume wine grape producers in Australia (mostly in Riverland SA supplying Treasury etc) from the late 90s till about 2010, after which newer products using Zigbee and cellular IoT took over (though we worked together on our own newer…

Why must the device be so cheap? Is the intent to have one serve each plant? Why can’t one serve many plants?

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#239

Post by 0xffff2 »

kbutler wrote: post #26
quest88 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is above your property in a controlled airspace? You'd probably get a license to fly drones to test the drones. Wouldn't you expect a test driver to have a driver's license?

In most (many?) US jurisdictions, you don't need a driver's license to drive on private property.

I would go so far as to claim ALL jurisdictions in the US. Does anyone have a counterexample?
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