Very cool! shameless self promotion but check out greenwave-monitor[1] for the 'Diagnostics TUI'. I'll get it into the buildfarm soon.
Nice, thanks! looks like a good one..
What's your payload? Where are the seeds? How are they deposited?
Recommend going to a farm right now to see how this works in production. For the most part, you can autonomously sow using GPS. But the farmer just rides along.
Payload is whatever you (or your startup) want it to be.
For me personally mechanical between row weeding is step one, then laser in-row weeding.
1. These on some linear actuators: https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-... (they work surprisingly well)
2. Beyond that for in-row weeding a engraving laser on a Delta: https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/m...
Or if I'm feeling rich by then this third party weeder looks pretty good https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER
3. For Seeding my salad crop https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang
4. Harvesting my salad crop https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester
I live on a farm, I have sold salad commercially, these are largely tools I already use and own, just moved about by motors rather than muscles.
This is a smaller scale thing than arable. We're talking a step up from manual horticulture (which is actually what still feeds much of the world)
From a video somewhere in the page: "The aim is to make food production more sustainable and efficient" yet requires a web app. I'd hope that you can run the server side on a local machine and not require cloud connectivity.
The web app runs locally from the robot. No cloud. Once we reach autonomy (still some way away) you shouldn't have to use that much either.
Quite interested in running robot<>robot and robot<>Farm comms over https://reticulum.network/ but that's a side project off a side project..
Great name, if nothing else!
Thanks, bit conflicted about it TBH, it's primarily/initially a weeding robot, although I do dream of expanding it to do harvesting, and yes potentially sowing too down the line.
Strapping something like the Jang P6 to it is probably feasible https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang
For the harvester it would be a bolt on for https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester or maybe https://reagtools.co.uk/products/babyleaf-harvester-80cm (I grow green salads)
And for weeding?
Initially keep it simple; Mechanical for between row weeding. I'll probably start strapping a couple of these to some linear actuators: https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-... (they work surprisingly well)
Beyond that for in-row weeding a engraving laser on a Delta: https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/m...
Or if I'm feeling rich by then this third party weeder looks pretty good https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER
I sometimes help out at a hobby vineyard of 0.7 hectare; weeding in the row is a lot of manual labour. Your platform seems like a good fit. I like tinkering and robotics, what kind of price point are you aiming for?
As cheap as possible, and no cheaper than that.
In my head it's £3-£5k, so by the time it's useful probably a bit more than that.
A joke that's whooshing over my head?
A robot that Sows seeds..
Aaaaaargh.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Thank you.
I highly encourage you to go visit farms sooner rather than later, especially during the rainy seasons and winter when farmers are really at work preparing for the next season. The kind of conditions robots need to deal with in that environment is no joke.
I also notice you're using the BNO055 -- if you need an C++ I2C ROS driver for it I wrote one (https://github.com/dheera/ros-imu-bno055). I think the one in the ROS apt-get repository is written in Python but they claimed the package name before I did
Good advice on farms. I do live on a farm, so somewhat familiar with mud! Many of the worst problems are caused by moving 20ton tractors around IMHO, one of the problems small scale ag robotics may help with.
Will check out your Bno055 currently using the upstream one in Lizard
https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/... https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/...
Any review of that welcome too of course.
This is the future, good luck to you