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Open Source Farming Robot

farm.bot

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Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#231
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern farming is anything but antiquated. A lot of science goes into it, and it's the most efficient use of national resources to produce food. The downsides you mentioned is purely the fault of the market, not farming itself.

I understand that a lot of science and technology goes into modern farming, and that it's much better than it used to be. You did not address one of the main downsides I mentioned, which is that it still seems to be extremely reliant on the weather.

It also makes use of the sun and rain for free, unlike controlled setups. Weather is an issue, but it's not an issue everywhere at once. Even now with the progressing climate change farmers are adapting. You have introduction of regenerative farming to mitigate erosion and help with water retention, planting wind barriers, more resistant plant varieties, and much more. It's all designed to help mitigate weather fluctuations. Startups growing wheat under UV lighting are not going to feed the planet.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#232
Farmer and roboticist here.

There is a lot of discussion in a lot of threads about the design of the robot to water "from the top" by spraying the leaves instead of watering directly on the roots, and whether that's a good or bad thing, and whether the designers of the robot thought about it.

Here's the problem with watering the leaves: yes, plants ultimately get their water from rain. But under normal conditions, the rain comes in sporadically in large quantities -- not every day -- and soaks into the soil, which is where the plants actually pick it up. Flood irrigation does largely the same thing. Spray irrigation doesn't attempt to water the soil that deeply, it tends to give the plants just what they need for the next 24-48 hours, and that encourages wilt and fungal infections.

Also, domesticated vegetable crops are far more susceptible to wilt and fungal infections than natives, and than grain crops, which are at the end of the day grasses. So you can in the same garden have perfectly healthy corn but all of your melons and squash have such bad fungal infections that the leaves are literally white. You can criticize the selection of vegetables for yield and not hardiness, but the fact is this is where we are with vegetable crops.

This is an interesting project, but IMHO it isn't practical, and there isn't any way to make it practical. The X-Y gantry design, for gardening, has a number of intractable problems, watering from the top being just one of them. Another is that the design doesn't scale. You can't make this thing handle a 25 by 100 foot grade bed, which is the size you'd need to even start making a serious dent in the nutritional needs of one person. It can't really weed, and there's no way to modify the design to make it weed effectively; you'd have to add degrees of freedom to the gantry so that it could reach down to soil level and grasp roots (or, alternatively, to very selectively apply an herbicide). Garden crops grow to dramatically different heights; micro greens will be a few inches about the soil, zucchini will be three feet high, tomatoes can be 4-5 feet, and corn depending on cultivar can be as much as 9 feet tall.

And finally, watering and weeding, if you know what you're doing are actually the easiest parts of the problem. Preparing the bed so you don't have to weed is a lot more work. To do that, you plant your crops and then apply large amounts of mulch. If you've never prepared beds, shoveled dirty barn straw for mulch or tried to wrangle weed barrier cloth on a hot, humid day, you haven't lived, my friend. That's the physically hard part. THe mentally hard part is diagnosing problems in your crops before they become problems. Noticing that those shiny weird insects flying around are squash vine borer. Looking at the underside of leaves and seeing squash beetle eggs or going around your tomatoes with a blacklight looking for cutworms.

If you want to apply robotics to gardens, you either need a low mobile base, or you need to carefully lay out rows with fixed spacing, and have a high mobile base that can clear the height of the crops, and can take a variety of attachments, e.g. tillers to handle weed control. Which means you need think about monocropping. Which starts to look like the mid 20th century basic garden tractor, the International Harvester Farmall Cub, just with maybe an electric power plant and an autonomy appliqué kit. THis makes sense because the mid 20th century was the last time people in North America practiced gardening as a survival mechanism, and the Farmall Cub was the result of 50 years of practical design by people who knew how to garden when it counted.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#233

This looks fun but not really useful. My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need. Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.

Is this not the best way to start on that path, an open source project yhat shares all the info so others can join branch and improve. Yiu cannot climb the mountastarting at the top !

For the complexity and materials in this project coupled with the fairly small coverage I think the best way to start is to garden by hand.

It makes more sense in a laboratory environment but this just seems like overkill for a regular person.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#234
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already some good points made about efficiency, but I’ll also add that for an individual sometimes it’s not about efficiency but about survivability in the event of a crisis. As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead to cascading failures that put individuals at risk, so it’s logical that some would want to mitigate the risk of food production failures.

> As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead to cascading failures that put individuals at risk I don’t know what you mean here. By 2020 I assume you mean the covid-19 pandemic? I agree that the pandemic itself put people at risk. But what do you mean by “cascading failures that put individuals at risk”? From my perspective society and systems of it kept on going despite the large scale upheavals happeni…

I suspect they are referring to the whole "we can't even produce face masks" kind of fiascos. Yes we got out of it alright, but in good portion out of pure luck that covid-19 isn't as deadly as ebola...

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#235
post #99

I've always wondered why this robot uses a gantry system. Would be less intrusive and thus easier to work alongside a human if it was a polar system, with a single pole in the middle/corner, like a tower crane. Simpler mechanically as well I suppose

I toyed with a cable-bot (like what is used for top-down shots at sporting events) for gardening. Needs three towers and probably difficult to make sturdy enough for watering but way cheaper at large scales than anything rigid and relatively more portable.

Sturdy enough for watering should not be too hard I guess. I'd say weeding it harder, depending on the method. Pulling out weeds with roots and all (most effective IME) requires some force and torque.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#236
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is indeed a juicero of farming. It costs 4 grand for something that can handle a single garden bed. This is not suitable for even small commerical growers, they'd need hundreds of these things. All commercial growers in my latitude start by sprouting their plants indoors, using e.g. soil blocks. Very little is direct sown. If you practice no-till, weeding isn't even that big of a task. This thing definitely does n…

Value for me is to scratch the zombie apocalypse itch. One feature request is some form of animal and pest protection. Squirrels and cardinals eat a majority percentage of the veggies in my raised bed here in Austin. I think some bats eat the vegetables as well but that’s difficult to validate.

You believe that this thing will have more usefulness in an apocalypse scenario? I think that anything high-tech immediately becomes far less useful if the infrastructure that supports modern electronics and computers collapses.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#237
A single bed isn't exactly an ungodly amount of effort to do by hand.

Think there is more potential industrial scale. i.e. run the arm over half a mile rather than a couple of feet

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#238
post #30

It sill looks like the software is written by people who don't know how to care for plants. You don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video; you'll just end up with fungus infestation. You water the soil and nourish the microorganisms that facilitate nutrient absorption in roots. But, I don't see any reason the technology can't be adapted to do the right thing.

rain?

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#239
post #230
post #30

It sill looks like the software is written by people who don't know how to care for plants. You don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video; you'll just end up with fungus infestation. You water the soil and nourish the microorganisms that facilitate nutrient absorption in roots. But, I don't see any reason the technology can't be adapted to do the right thing.

> you don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video That’s pretty much what happens when plants get “watered” naturally though… I’m thinking about rain of course

From my understanding gathered from grandparents, problems occur when watering under the sun because droplets act like magnifier and burn the leaves.

Watering the soil means you don't need to care about the sun.

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