As an aside, mechanical harvesters for grapes are hilarious. You still need people to run them. One person's job is to find and remove possums from the fruit bin before the critter is buried by a thousand pounds of fruit.
It is a distraction to talk about the gantry, XY or radial. Any gantry based system is going to be a headache from the start because you've got those rails cluttering up the space. Eventually you'll find something the robot cannot do and then you'll be trying to figure out how to get your general purpose tractor around without crushing the gantry.
The radial system is cute, except now your installation and operating costs scale linearly with the amount of crops. With an XY system, one can plant more and extend the rails and have the existing robots do more work. Not possible with the radial system, unless you are going to physically pick up and move the units between circles few times each day. If time is tight (plague of locusts coming in tomorrow, need more robots to squish them) you can increase the robot density by sliding more robots onto the XY gantry. Not possible with radial.
Ultimately it will be about the vision processing and manipulators. And then you might as well mount the vision/manipulator unit on a tractor and have a robot-tractor drive up and down the fields, just like any other piece of equipment. Vastly cheaper and more flexible than gantries.
Eventually we will get there, but it probably won't be until vision processing and lidar gets a whole lot cheaper. We might be on the cusp though, based on the computer vision advances in video gaming.
User roryaronson, I've done a lot with robotics and outdoor electronics too. If you want I can give you a fairly lengthy piece of constructive critism about your whitepaper. You've got a lot of good ideas in there, but just as much misinformation.
I look at this and instantly think "Dirt. And water." Dirt and water will destroy their "machine." Whoever conceived it doesn't respect that farming involves dirt. And water.
As you remind us above, THE TRACTOR IS THE ROBOT. The tractor is safe from Dirt and water. Unless this is some desktop thing. Even as a gantry system, their rendering is naive. ISHYGDDT.
That said, having a high tech piece of equipment with a bunch of moving parts outdoors does seem quite problematic and headache inducing. Here's to reaching the cusp fast....
Like you said, high-tech outdoors is troublesome. If you want to get a head start on this sort of thing buy an outdoor robot chasis (or make one if you can hold a screwdriver, it'll save you a grand or two). Throw on a kinect, all the cameras you can fit and all the lidar you can afford.
First, teach it what rain is and how to quickly get back to the safety of the charging port. Second, make it navigate around the garden without destroying the plants. Finally, teach it what to look for (pests, damage, ripeness). Don't bother giving it manipulators, just have it log findings and generate reports. When you get home, it can tell you exactly which plants need attention.
Yeah, this will never be practical. But most of the building blocks that go into it are thinks you would need to automate farming. And it is interesting that someone is taking a stab at it.
The Netherlands has so many greenhouses they can seen from the space station without a telescope, and many of them grow food crops (tomatoes and paprika being the largest two)
For that purpose it seems to have the capability to automate some tedious jobs quite nicely. I would pay for a machine that grows vegetables in my backyard with little to no input from me.
That said, the possum remover must be the most hilariously bad job in farming.
Your comment makes me wonder what a good pricepoint would be for such a system. How much money and how much space would you be willing to give up, for example.
Less hypothetically, why the fixation on machines? We've got all sorts of crazy services these days. How much would you be willing to pay for a gardening service that maintains your garden for you and occasionally leaves a crate of produce at your backdoor? It would be like a lawn service, but without all the terrible effects on the local ecology.
On the other hand, I've put in a ton of effort on tomatoes, and gotten very little to show for it. The climate just isn't friendly to them.
"there are no food crops that are economical to grow inside a greenhouse" - there are many organic lettuce/greens growers that put lie to this statement.
I don't like the gantry system, mostly because what you stated. Also because it is _extremely_ expensive vs. other methods. If you're doing that, you might as well just put it on wheels and have it drive around.
The radial system can still run more robots - I don't see any restrictions past weight on the arm. It is the equivalent of a circle sprayer, just with robots instead of water.
As for cheap vision/LIDAR, it is most certainly not driven by games. The big Deere tractors are moving away from LIDAR towards sets of stereo cameras because the algorithms are getting better and the cameras are much cheaper and more robust than LIDAR.
I see this device fitting a niche in "black greenhouses" where there aren't any humans involved at all. Totally recycled, totally hermetically sealed environments, like a clean room for plants.
How do you get the extra robots installed on the radial systems? With gantry and wheel based systems, you plop them down at one end of the field and then they re-arrange themselves.
I was specifically thinking the advances in time-of-flight LIDAR that seem to be for short range (several feet) gesture recognition. Not for object avoidance (Deere's use case) but on the wrist of a manipulator, where you don't always have the space for a stereo-optical setup.
One day hermetic greenhouses might make sense. Until then it will be cheaper and (arguably) less impactful to grow the veg someplace with reasonable weather and pests and ship it instead.
check out this short video on vertical farms in Singapore http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nFQOkzEjxQ
The waterwheel thing is clever not for the energy efficiency (it'll be the same regardless) but because it greatly reduces the amount of mechanics/electronics that are exposed to the greenhouse humidity, greatly improving reliability. (Installation cost is probably the same as if you had a gearmotor on every tower, just because the funny waterwheel is probably not an OTS part.)
But even in the video they call it a "premium novelty for consumers", which basically means not yet economical. And who knows how much of it was backed by the mentioned incentives. (They show some prices at 5:12 and 5:41, maybe that can give an idea.)
As an aside? How to mechanical harvesters for grapes work without breaking/getting tangled in the wires supporting the vines?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv-AnyvWL7g around 38 seconds in.
Quality is questionable, as it will also harvest the unripe secondary clusters and any rot. (There are probably visual systems for cleaning these out.)
Grapes (and a lot of perennial fruits) are a little oddball in this discussion though, because they are very low impact. For example, you rarely (maybe once when first planting) have to till or fertilize or spray for weeds and we've got plenty of biodiversity in the turf.
People who did this might want to also check out the Global Village Construction Set:
http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio...
http://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest....
He talks about turning a de-forested area back into a rain forest. It's like an algorithm for sustainable living.
Two tracks on either side with one main gantry and tool in the middle. The design is very simple (which is very good) and I think the principles are straightforward enough for the DIYer to begin tinkering almost immediately. 3D printers, while getting cheaper, aren't as cheap as inkjet printers and until that becomes are reality, making parts will be a bit expensive.
But for a small green house version I can see someone using furniture drawer tracks or screen door tracks from the nearest hardware shop and begin building one of their own. Someone with basic woodworking skills can put together a basic version fairly quickly. Arduino programming is also pretty simple that a novice can get working quickly. A motor controller board will really help with a smaller version.
I especially like the design for the Crop Circle Bot : http://wiki.farmbot.it/file/detail/Sketch%2C%20FarmBot%20for...
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/09/26/business/latest-...
But a start is a good start, and really wheels can be a hassle, seeing as tractors can't operate on muddy soil (well, shouldn't).
I'm actually somewhat glad someone is doing this. I had a similar idea way-back-when, for gardening, but I had no idea how to handle the issue of having the seeder/weeder/watering device climb over taller vegetables, such as tomatoes, which can get up to 4ft tall, or the mighty sweet corn plant, which can get up to 6ft and higher, at least not without making the thing ugly as all hell or severely manhandle the crop. This is an attractive looking step in a good direction.
I'll follow you on Facebook and occasionally remark about the hell that is trying to grow vegetables in East Texas.
"If you have another way to donate in mind"
At the moment it looks a bit too much like someone's had a great idea, done a bit of initial design and thrown together a wiki page. It doesn't seem serious enough for me to donate at this stage.
We are working towards a crowdfunding launch in 2014 as stated on page 47 of the white paper: http://www.scribd.com/doc/169536137/FarmBot-Humanity-s-Open-...
We've received a good amount of donations so far and will be ordering materials for the initial design this week and next.
I'm currently recruiting other students at my local university to work on the project, and we plan to flesh out the wiki with timelines, design files, and progress updates soon.
Thanks for checking out the project!
Could be something of REAL benefit to the world, which is more than most HN stories can say.
What about a spindly-legged robot (picture those tall things in Half Life, or the killers in War of the Worlds) that wasn't constrained by rails? It used a camera to identify where to safely step, returned to a base to charge (solar on shed roof nearby) or replenish its (small) water and seed supply.
Sensors helped it check water moisture and know when to rewater. In its travels, it got a picture of which regions had the most sun, so it knew what would grow best and where.
Wonder if it could (with camera or sensor) identify what was growing where to help with decisions, or even remove upcoming weeds before they got established?
At a smaller scale, I can sow the seed myself. I can harvest myself. What I do need automated is the areas where I consistently fail when trying to grow my own vegetable patch. Watering is the main one. Just having a sensor to detect when to switch on and off the hose pipe would probably save most of my crops. Slug control would be another - something to detect when a slug gets to close and zaps em with (preferably) a laser.
Not to mention the impact of testing different field configurations in varying climates all over the world. Whether the robotic design of the system is cost efficient or not, we should be at least collecting and sharing this data now.
They'll even inspect plants at regular intervals and remove bugs. They'll decide when fruit is ready to pick and share all the data with systems that buy, transport and use produce.
It could also pull weeds getting rid of the need for herbicide.
They could have come up with something far more powerful just by sticking it on the front of a tractor and having some tanks/bins for consumables.
Heck, they could have even started from common irrigation systems where you can have 400m of pipe on wheels you roll across the whole field.
I have to wonder how much farmer experience anyone behind this has and if they even looked at current farming equipment before just scaling up a computer printer and sticking a different end on the head.
Here is an idea for a startup: Shipping container weed farm. Order one online, plug in, insert seeds, press button.