this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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It's a neat idea, but at a small scale the little planting and weeding is really not a big deal to do by hand and scaling this up to greenhouse size would be probably prohibitly expensive for most people.
There are people who cannot do even that little bit of weeding.
Then in all likelihood they can't maintain such a robot either.
this is sadly one of the big problems with farmbot, keeping the trackways clear in an actual use situation requires as much work as weeding. My hope is that ambulatory platforms (spider robots) which are able to nimbly move through a garden space while carrying the required tool heads will be able to use these methods to work in much larger areas and without so much visually disagreeable infrastructure.
🕷️💚
Do you know if anybody is working on a spider / walking bot?
I was looking at the farmbot and thinking a version with 20" bicycle wheels would be better. Then you could have a long path where it just moves back and forth. And maybe use a robot arm based on rotating arms instead of linear actuators. And then build the whole thing so it fits neatly under a big glass solar panel. Maybe a tool changer so it can pick up a watering can. The mechanical side should be relatively easy to build, the problem still seems to be the AI vision software.
With food prices rising it might be worth it if you can increase the area it can patrol.
Having been around CNCs, robots, and gardens I tend to agree. If you can't handle weeding in a human-sized garden, don't garden. Especially when you mulch and plant a good mix to cover ground and different plant heights there aren't really any weeds to begin with.