301–310 of 369 posts
Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible product. Who is the customer? If you like gardening, why would you pay thousands of dollars so that you don't need to do it? If you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be interested in having a robot do it for you. I just can't imagine who would buy this. Gardening can be done very cheap and I believe that most people do it because they like spend…
Other ag-academic research teams.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every family having to have a robot instead of a handful of tractors for every ten thousand families or so. And that is likely a less optimal use of acreage. I think what you might actually be advocating for is “people should convert more residential land into gardens” which is always fun. I love my garden as a hobby. We keep trying to un-invent the division of labour. Edited for unnecessary pre-coffee poor behaviour…
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If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Your comment would be fine without the first (and I would also say the last) sentence.
The promo video - Industrial Farming Bad, Take Back Control, epic movie trailer soundtrack - is a real hoot, given the product it's selling.
A lot of people are criticizing this product. Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? Very curious! Also any community recommendations would be great.
> Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? I think you're misinterpreting the criticisms. It's not "this particular product is a bad implementation compared to other one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism products", but rather "a one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism approach to this problem space doesn't make any sense" This is a very typical tech-industry "everything looks like…
If you have resources I can read or learn from about all this, please share them. You've clearly got wisdom in this space!
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.
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.
Probably? But spraying water on leaves is not only the way water naturally gets to plants, it's often the only practical way to water crops at scale. Center-pivot irrigation has dramatically increased the amount of and reliability of arable cropland, while being dramatically less sensitive to topography and preparation than flood irrigation. The advice to "water the soil, not the leaves" is founded in manual watering…
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.
I had the same thoughts when watching this. Cucumbers either require twine, in which case they grow quite tall), or each plant will take up half that raised bed. Tomatoes are not planted directly from a seed, you first need to grow seedlings, a very laborious process that’s hard to automate. Tomatoes can also get quite tall, with some plants exceeding 5 feet. You don’t need such elaborate setups for irrigation either…
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Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us. We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
> Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us. That's assuming that we are somehow outside of nature. > We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better. We don't have to , no , but we do , because that's how we learn. Nobody was claiming the "natural" way was better, just that it migh…
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But drip irrigation doesn’t scale because you would need to lay + connect + pressurize + maintain hundreds of miles of hoses. It’s high-CapEx. A “watering robot”, meanwhile, can just do what a human gardener does to water a garden, “at scale.” Picture a carrot harvester-alike machine — something whose main body sits on a dirt track between narrow-packed row-groups, with a gantry over the row-group supported by narrow…
Fair point, the robot could lower its nozzle to the ground and jet the water there, much like a human would, with probably not a lot of changes required. That does seem like it would be a good optimization.
IIUC that's what big box gardening centers do; with fixed retractable hoses for misting and watering.
A robot could make and refill clay irrigation Ollas with or without microsprinkler inlets and level sensing with backscatter RF, but do Ollas scale?
Why have a moving part there at all? Could just modulate spec valves to high and low or better fixed height sprayers
FWIU newer solar weeding robots - which minimize pesticide use by direct substitution and minimize herbicide by vigilant crop monitoring - have fixed arrays instead of moving part lasers
An agricultural robot spec:
Large wheels, light frame, can right itself when terrain topology is misestimated, Tensor operations per second (TOPS), Computer Vision (OpenCV, NeRF,), modular sensor and utility mounts, Open CAD model with material density for mass centroid and ground contact outer hull rollover estimation,