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 in one direction along a bed, there's no way to scale.
3 - grit. Precision CnC mechanisms and dirt do not mix. You can't keep farm things clean (unless hydro, and even then, things get wet and caked with fertilizer salt)
Ditch the linear ways for something like bike tires. There's an open source solar farm robot which rolls around weeding (can't find at the moment, maybe was a video). Not limited by a box. They need robust mechanisms which can stand up to farm abuse and are easy to service, grease, and replace (unless you hermetically seal the components, which is harder than it sounds).
Weeds are actually pretty easy to manage.
If someone wants to make an impact in the farm tech space, come up with a cheaper alternative for scooping and dumping dirt. A ride-on tractor can be had used for $500-800. But as soon as you start talking loaders, it's $2-3000 used, and tens of thousands for new. Also the smallest tend to be a 4 foot wide bucket and a few hundred pounds lift. I want something half or a quarter of that. Able to scoop 50 lbs of dirt, repeatedly, and dig holes/trenches. That would have a massive impact in agrarian communities around the world.
There's a weird sort of reverse classism I saw in my relatives going up. You might summarize it as 'people without dirt under their nails don't understand shit'.
As someone who went through endurance sports, being the fix-it guy, and a CS program I always sort of had one foot in both worlds and didn't really engage in this kind of rhetoric.
But as I've been accumulating more woodworking tools and getting a lot of dirt under my nails building a giant garden, I'm starting to see their point.
This device is going to gum up, being exposed to UV all day, dust, wind, and rain. The tolerances on this device are way tighter than any in situ environment is going to allow. And you're going to kneel on that track and it's gonna hurt like a motherfucker.
This will be like a pet turtle you have to keep flipping right side up, not like a roomba.
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.
The simple AB line served the agricultural guidance industry (think GPS) for many years before systems capable of handling complex curves arrived on the market.
Your argument is a strawman, this obviously isn't for commercial farming. This is for personal use for people who have a 120 sqft+ in their backyard.....
I know cnc and farming, and I really don't see this product surviving. I can't find a shovel that lasts more than a few months on my small farm, I don't know how a big 3d printer is going to cut it in anything like real agricultural conditions. I would love to be wrong though, garden robots would be great, especially if they had lasers for slugs. Actually, forget the rest of the robot, all I really want is a slug laser.
This project has been around nearly ten years. They've sold hundreds (or possibly thousands) and raised well over a million dollars. Looking through their forum, I'd guess they continually identify faulty parts (O-rings, moisture sensor, belt alignment) and improve these in successive designs. They make effective suggestions for maintenance and replacement of parts.
I do believe this won't necessarily save someone time. It probably just turns two hours of vegetable gardening per week into one hour of vegetable gardening plus one hour of robot gardening. I believe there are enough people in the world who enjoy gardening their mechatronics for this to have a respectable future, but I agree that it will never compete with any commercial venture
... unless someone invents an OpenCV saffron stigma identifier.
The project is from circa-2000, I remember being impressed by the idea at the time, and I'd have thought slug-hunting robots would be more of a common thing by now - turns out robotics for agriculture are hard.
Just a crazy idea - they say you can do farming from anywhere using their app. So... What about Farming-as-a-Service. You assign users small patches, where they can do whatever they like, and how they like it, and any surviving vegetables are shipped to them. Sounds silly, and is mostly for lolz, may not be sustainable either, but who knows :) ?...
Agreed, this is a nice hobby project but it is nowhere near ruggedized enough to survive the weather, let alone farming for more than the period of the demonstration. Too fragile, too many delicate exposed parts, grooves aimed upwards where moisture and dirt will collect and so on.
I don't have much garden experience, and I could possibly imagine this thing surviving in a greenhouse. But on the outside I agree with you, at the least there will be some intervention required.
> I would love to be wrong though, garden robots would be great, especially if they had lasers for slugs
I’ve had a similar idea before, for roaches, but I’m just not sure how it could work. Surely any laser with enough power output to kill something would cause a decent amount of collateral as well?
From the video it seems like there's a model that can switch tools - so if you install a night vision camera, strong laser and train some sort of fancy model to detect slugs that are not currently obscured by leaves, you might be able to laser them.
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. Reducing herbicide use by 80% or more, allowing the use of non-GMO crop while maintaining strong weed control and healthy crop, treating and optimizing every individual plant in a field, all things that will happen in the next 10 years due to robotics in the farm.
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.
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.
Happy to see this get some attention! I've been following it for the last 6ish years, and it's been cool to see their progress.
I think a few commenters are missing the point of this project. It's not a commercial robot and it's not meant to mass produce food. It seems maybe the use the word "farm" is being taken too literally. Their four stated applications are:
1. Education
2. Home use
3. Research
4. Accessibility
This is the description from their white paper [0]:
> The vision of this project is to create an open and accessible technology aiding everyone to grow food and to grow food for everyone. The mission is to grow a community that produces free and open-source hardware plans, software, data, and documentation enabling everyone to build and operate a farming machine.
No doubt the tech is interesting but conceptually this is pretty awful.
Anyone who has done it knows if you have irrigation sorted there is very little needed for seedlings to grow to full size. Even with no irrigation we’re only talking 5mins watering on dry days.
Adding all this electronics and metal to an otherwise organic and natural process is environmentally, economically and spiritually detrimental.
I thought the same. Why not just sort out an automated irrigation system, and do the initial seeding manually? Even with a robot there will be manual work like cleaning weeds, pruning, etc.
Very cool, but they should market it for what it is -- backyard farming for people that like automation. Large scale farming is pretty damn automated already. We can probably really improve on pesticide use, soil health, pollination etc (things that relate to optimising the ecological interactions between organisms).
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 .
I don’t get it, what does it do? Automatically water plants? You can do that with a sub irrigated planter with zero electricity and achieve fantastic yields.
From the video, I'm puzzled why they would water plants with a robotic nozzle spraying on the plant/leaves. Watering works better the way it does now: run a pipe along the plants and water the soil.
Leaves probably want some moisture too. If you run pipes straight to the stem you'll have to rearrange them each time you changes here individual plants are which is harder to automate.
Growing your own veggies requires an awful lot of time, so barely anybody does it.
If this robot allows people with little time to grow vegetables in their backyard, you can argue that they will move closer to soil rather than further...
The user-interface, planning your plot sure does gameify that aspect very much like a farm simulator. Heck, in today's times I shudder how much game/real-life cross-over and IP conflicts we see play out in the years too come.
Maybe this product is an April fools joke gone Theranos? The first thing I noticed was the overhead water sprayer, which is a SFG anti-pattern.
Avoid overhead watering with automatic sprinkler systems. Those systems are designed for large areas (like lawns) that need a broad application of water, not your Square Foot Garden that’s designed to take up little space. The overhead spray never gets to the root zone beneath your plants’ leaves, so the watering winds up being insufficient. That overhead spray also quickly evaporates, leading to water waste, and leaves foliage wet which can lead to pest and disease issues.
I had a friend reach out to me, because his dad is a farmer and needed a programmer to work on his tractors, or something like that. I gave him some suggestions such as posting upwork, and fverr. I would hate to be in his position. I don't see anyone with the required electrical engineering background, willing to work on a one off project for a farmer. As far as I know, he did not find anyone.
I do this kind of small consulting (firmware/hardware design & integration, etc.) on the side from my day job. I find that the biggest problem is discovery. There are many individuals and small businesses out there that need simple control systems built, but the only firms they can find are the ones with lots of marketing but they're too big to care about a 20-hour project.
If your friend still has this need, my contact info is in my profile. I'm in the US and happy to help.
out of curiosity, what did he need done and how much was he offering? I do think the kind of SWE you need for that kind of job is unlikely to hang out on fiverrr or upwork.
I wish I could like this idea, but their price is pretty steep for how small of an area they cover. Their ROI page is all about the cost of growing your own veggies vs. store-bought, but that misses the mark(et). Bots like this do not compete with stores, they compete with your own manual labor to DIY. And the labor to grow some veggies (especially in a raised garden box) is not that painful.
They would be better served focusing on this as an accessibility device, allowing people to garden who do not have the physical capability to otherwise do so.
Other people will love this but the analog nature of gardening is what keeps me interested. This sort of ruins the meditative joy I get out of the hobby.
But if Homelab + Dirt = awesome to you, more power to you.
The very definition of hacking applied to gardening. I think we need more agricultural robotics. This is a useful beginning and its been iterating for few years. Good stuff.
Some of the complaints about linear garden beds is just not valid. Different crops can definitely be linear, even grid-like. This idea can be scaled up with increasing complexity as needed.
It will be interesting to see where this kind of idea goes as the projects themselves itself grow up.
I do a lot of home gardening. In my front yard I have four 10x5' raised beds for annuals. I setup drip tape on a timer and mulch with straw. Beyond that I do almost zero work to maintain the plants. Occasional weeding when I see weeds starting to crowd out a productive plant and certain plants need to be pruned to form.
I really can't see the value add from adding a CNC machine to each raised bed.
This is a cool concept, and probably can be applied to some sort of specific farm design, but I kinda feel like there's a better way to implement some parts of this.
Drip irrigation for watering and fertilizing comes to mind, which really is a better solution and prevents the need to water directly onto the leaves of the plant, which is a huge no-no to a lot of plants.
Brilliant take. Especially if you use some sort of roller-coaster-tire style mechanism vs linear ways, which just aren't going to stay aligned.
It would need a position and feedback system outside of the current "servo and home position" method, because even with closed loop motors, the distance traversed isn't exact. We need a cheap, easy way to get accurate-ish absolute position (1-3cm), maybe acoustics and phase-based?
Does it? The current construction severely limits the scale at which it could operate, so it will run out of work to do pretty quickly. That means it'll be idle most of the time. If you have a similar complexity robot but mobile, it could be trucking around a much larger field.
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
The website trips one of my major heuristics for caution: it doesn't say who is behind it. There's no "about us" section (that I could see, maybe it's there and I missed it?)
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.
Yes, planting, watering and weeding are the easy parts. Keeping deer, birds, rabbits and raccoons from eating everything is a much bigger issue, in my experience.
I would recommend against the CSS transform the website has on the YouTube videos, that's degrading performance by a margin and is really not worth it.
Also there's no scrollbar at all, that's super silly.
kortex|4 years ago
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 in one direction along a bed, there's no way to scale.
3 - grit. Precision CnC mechanisms and dirt do not mix. You can't keep farm things clean (unless hydro, and even then, things get wet and caked with fertilizer salt)
Ditch the linear ways for something like bike tires. There's an open source solar farm robot which rolls around weeding (can't find at the moment, maybe was a video). Not limited by a box. They need robust mechanisms which can stand up to farm abuse and are easy to service, grease, and replace (unless you hermetically seal the components, which is harder than it sounds).
Weeds are actually pretty easy to manage.
If someone wants to make an impact in the farm tech space, come up with a cheaper alternative for scooping and dumping dirt. A ride-on tractor can be had used for $500-800. But as soon as you start talking loaders, it's $2-3000 used, and tens of thousands for new. Also the smallest tend to be a 4 foot wide bucket and a few hundred pounds lift. I want something half or a quarter of that. Able to scoop 50 lbs of dirt, repeatedly, and dig holes/trenches. That would have a massive impact in agrarian communities around the world.
hinkley|4 years ago
As someone who went through endurance sports, being the fix-it guy, and a CS program I always sort of had one foot in both worlds and didn't really engage in this kind of rhetoric.
But as I've been accumulating more woodworking tools and getting a lot of dirt under my nails building a giant garden, I'm starting to see their point.
This device is going to gum up, being exposed to UV all day, dust, wind, and rain. The tolerances on this device are way tighter than any in situ environment is going to allow. And you're going to kneel on that track and it's gonna hurt like a motherfucker.
This will be like a pet turtle you have to keep flipping right side up, not like a roomba.
bobiny|4 years ago
nobody_nowhere|4 years ago
iRobot founders' new thing. Small, and undercapitalized, but promising.
skrebbel|4 years ago
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 fields: https://www.google.com/search?q=aardappelveld&source=lnms&tb...
34679|4 years ago
https://www.toro.com/en/professional-contractor/compact-util...
randomdata|4 years ago
The simple AB line served the agricultural guidance industry (think GPS) for many years before systems capable of handling complex curves arrived on the market.
nickspacek|4 years ago
manimm|4 years ago
justsomeperson|4 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spidercam
Where it can be suspended above the field and moved to any point above the plant and can be raised as crops grow?
weatherlight|4 years ago
jedimastert|4 years ago
waynesonfire|4 years ago
tony0x02|4 years ago
taylorfinley|4 years ago
PennRobotics|4 years ago
I do believe this won't necessarily save someone time. It probably just turns two hours of vegetable gardening per week into one hour of vegetable gardening plus one hour of robot gardening. I believe there are enough people in the world who enjoy gardening their mechatronics for this to have a respectable future, but I agree that it will never compete with any commercial venture
... unless someone invents an OpenCV saffron stigma identifier.
dhicks6345789|4 years ago
Even better: a slug-hunting robot powered by fermented slugs:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/tmp/slugbot.html
The project is from circa-2000, I remember being impressed by the idea at the time, and I'd have thought slug-hunting robots would be more of a common thing by now - turns out robotics for agriculture are hard.
rytis|4 years ago
wildpeaks|4 years ago
your slugs now shoot lasers
jacquesm|4 years ago
Props for trying though.
thepete2|4 years ago
the_only_law|4 years ago
I’ve had a similar idea before, for roaches, but I’m just not sure how it could work. Surely any laser with enough power output to kill something would cause a decent amount of collateral as well?
schmorptron|4 years ago
bobiny|4 years ago
foxhop|4 years ago
deeviant|4 years ago
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. Reducing herbicide use by 80% or more, allowing the use of non-GMO crop while maintaining strong weed control and healthy crop, treating and optimizing every individual plant in a field, all things that will happen in the next 10 years due to robotics in the farm.
TaylorAlexander|4 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27634450
AnimalMuppet|4 years ago
jredwards|4 years ago
malloryerik|4 years ago
maxioatic|4 years ago
I think a few commenters are missing the point of this project. It's not a commercial robot and it's not meant to mass produce food. It seems maybe the use the word "farm" is being taken too literally. Their four stated applications are:
1. Education
2. Home use
3. Research
4. Accessibility
This is the description from their white paper [0]:
> The vision of this project is to create an open and accessible technology aiding everyone to grow food and to grow food for everyone. The mission is to grow a community that produces free and open-source hardware plans, software, data, and documentation enabling everyone to build and operate a farming machine.
[0] - https://farm.bot/blogs/news/the-farmbot-whitepaper
jasondozell|4 years ago
Anyone who has done it knows if you have irrigation sorted there is very little needed for seedlings to grow to full size. Even with no irrigation we’re only talking 5mins watering on dry days.
Adding all this electronics and metal to an otherwise organic and natural process is environmentally, economically and spiritually detrimental.
sgt|4 years ago
opinologo|4 years ago
Metals (although in tiny portions) are part of ourselves but plastics are not.
wjaugustyn|4 years ago
swiftcoder|4 years ago
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.
ducttapecrown|4 years ago
11thEarlOfMar|4 years ago
How much produce is produced?
How much time spent cleaning, repairing, or otherwise keeping it running
What preventive maintenance is required?
i.e., other than a learning tool, if you just consider the small garden users, what's the return?
oxymoran|4 years ago
mytailorisrich|4 years ago
bobiny|4 years ago
bobiny|4 years ago
d--b|4 years ago
If this robot allows people with little time to grow vegetables in their backyard, you can argue that they will move closer to soil rather than further...
Zenst|4 years ago
junon|4 years ago
adolph|4 years ago
Avoid overhead watering with automatic sprinkler systems. Those systems are designed for large areas (like lawns) that need a broad application of water, not your Square Foot Garden that’s designed to take up little space. The overhead spray never gets to the root zone beneath your plants’ leaves, so the watering winds up being insufficient. That overhead spray also quickly evaporates, leading to water waste, and leaves foliage wet which can lead to pest and disease issues.
https://squarefootgardening.org/2020/05/watering-methods-for...
dukeofdoom|4 years ago
HeyLaughingBoy|4 years ago
I do this kind of small consulting (firmware/hardware design & integration, etc.) on the side from my day job. I find that the biggest problem is discovery. There are many individuals and small businesses out there that need simple control systems built, but the only firms they can find are the ones with lots of marketing but they're too big to care about a 20-hour project.
If your friend still has this need, my contact info is in my profile. I'm in the US and happy to help.
stingrae|4 years ago
codingdave|4 years ago
They would be better served focusing on this as an accessibility device, allowing people to garden who do not have the physical capability to otherwise do so.
jasondozell|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
sklargh|4 years ago
But if Homelab + Dirt = awesome to you, more power to you.
sfgweilr4f|4 years ago
Some of the complaints about linear garden beds is just not valid. Different crops can definitely be linear, even grid-like. This idea can be scaled up with increasing complexity as needed.
It will be interesting to see where this kind of idea goes as the projects themselves itself grow up.
solomonb|4 years ago
I really can't see the value add from adding a CNC machine to each raised bed.
lxe|4 years ago
Drip irrigation for watering and fertilizing comes to mind, which really is a better solution and prevents the need to water directly onto the leaves of the plant, which is a huge no-no to a lot of plants.
rmah|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
catmanjan|4 years ago
kortex|4 years ago
It would need a position and feedback system outside of the current "servo and home position" method, because even with closed loop motors, the distance traversed isn't exact. We need a cheap, easy way to get accurate-ish absolute position (1-3cm), maybe acoustics and phase-based?
swiley|4 years ago
WJW|4 years ago
arduinomancer|4 years ago
The smallest kit is $1500 USD.
The watering seems like the actual place where time could be saved but that could be accomplished with a basic automatic sprinkler.
6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago
diydsp|4 years ago
They even give away their own game:
> or simply impress your friends and neighbors with a quick demo
carapace|4 years ago
RyanGoosling|4 years ago
cube2222|4 years ago
I'd love something like this, and with a refillable water tank.
max_likelihood|4 years ago
bobiny|4 years ago
vntok|4 years ago
ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago
Cool stuff.
sublimefire|4 years ago
PopePompus|4 years ago
donw|4 years ago
matthewfelgate|4 years ago
maxwelljoslyn|4 years ago
timbre1234|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
williesleg|4 years ago
[deleted]
fit2rule|4 years ago
[deleted]
foxhop|4 years ago
[deleted]
ehnto|4 years ago
Also there's no scrollbar at all, that's super silly.