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Comment by djb_hackernews | Hacker News Reader

As a hobby gardener and wannabe roboticist I've thought a lot about this problem. Before I continue I love this thing and am seriously thinking about getting one.

However, a concern that I'm sure they've thought a lot about is in it's technique. I really only care about making sure there are no weeds within, say, 8 inches of my plants (or put another way, my level of concern about a weed is proportional to it's distance from my vegetable or flower plant). This looks like it will weed everything except the 8 inches around the plant. Never mind things like cucumbers that spread out on the ground and have important bits that are short and can't be contained by the wire protectors. Still, an exciting place to start.

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I do raised beds as well, so I have the same concern. But from my point of view the larger issue is that I'm almost never only weeding. Like, it's just not that big of a job.

But more importantly, time spent "in the garden" includes a lot of inspection and minor adjustments to all kinds of things— move plants on a trellis, pinching suckers off the tomatoes, clipping blighted leaves off of plants, ensuring flowers are getting fertilized, monitoring fruit growth, etc.

All of this stuff is an essential part of being in tune with what's going on out there, and I'm not sure that having a robot do one small piece of it is beneficial. Basically, this product doesn't really look like it was built by a gardener— it looks like it was someone who had a solution they wanted to apply elsewhere, and spent 15 minutes watching a gardener at work, without really understanding what they were doing.

Watering would be a nice function as well. Many people don't want to bother with water pipes, so a bot that takes care of watering would be useful.

In my opinion, that suffers from the same fundamental issue that it's covering a small portion of the visible work that a gardener is doing, but isn't accounting for all the observation and tweaks.

Basically I'm just not sure it's realistic to pitch this product to someone who wants to have an outdoor garden but spend little to no time actually tending it. I feel this kind of user might be better served by something like Aerogarden.

In any case, it's a much harder problem because watering even a small garden takes a _lot_ of water, so for it to be practical, you either need a robot with a huge (and very heavy) reservoir, or a base station at which it can fill up (which would almost certainly require leaving the garden bed itself, massively complicating the whole system).

Maybe you could attach a garden hose.

> Maybe you could attach a garden hose.

It would have to be a much stronger robot to haul around a garden hose. Those things can easily weigh several kilograms when they're full of water, not to mention they can get caught on obstructions rather easily.

Market for this is probably people who have the money and think its cool over a real practical use.

You just have to have people convinced it will make their lives easier long enough for them to take it home.

Have you used one of these robot vacuum cleaners? I sometimes think they spend more time getting caught on obstructions than vacuuming. :)

There's always a sock waiting to be stuck on somewhere...

But I don't get it why they won't make the robot reverse a short bit and try to go around instead of just rolling over and die.

That would solve 99% of the situations I have rescued my old Roomba and current Neato from. It's very seldom they actually got something entangled in their brushes.

I think the concern is probably causing damage. In my home it's usually wires that are a problem.

It already is damaging things as it is. The Neato have peeled a USB cable and an audio cable. It also have chewed on a few laptop charger cables but they seems to be tougher so no damage. Hopefully it won't peel something that could be dangerous.

I doubt it could be that hard to detect an unusually low rotation speed. Now it seems to chug until it really stalls. Instead it should stop the brushes immediately and retreat, then retry with just the fan running.

I'd settle for a garden hose that doesn't perish from UV damage after a season and doesn't kink every 7 seconds. Sounds like a pretty simple thing to get - it isn't.

Things would get tangled in a hurry with the hose getting caught up or stuck. Low pressure would help but I still don't think it's viable on anything but row based gardens.

what might be cool is a method by which the robot could tell you the garden needs to be watered. so some sort of sampler to make this determination. get really advanced with optics and we could eventually have it determine if there is a bug problem or disease.

the robot doesn't necessarily need to do all the work, just identify what needs to be done beyond its specialty

There are a ton of products already in that space, though. It's basically an Arduino or RasPi with a ph/moisture probe stuck it the soil.

See: https://www.google.ca/search?q=garden+arduino

I brew up and spray compost tea in 5 gallon batches. A machine that would continuously brew tea and go walk around the garden spraying it everywhere would be pretty cool. But also far more of a niche.

For any others who are slightly disgusted but also intrigued: http://www.finegardening.com/brewing-compost-tea

I agree (as someone who spends all my time in my garden when I'm not at work). I enjoy being outside, getting fresh air, clearing my head, and tending to my own garden. There is something really refreshing about doing it and I'd have zero interest in automating away any portion of it. Just my 2 cents...

My family kept a large garden for the duration of my childhood. I was made to weed it. It was absolutely that big of a job. It took a couple hours. Every day.

It looks like they started with a Roomba and went from there, which leaves them with a robot that can't deal with raised beds or (as you said) weeds integrated with plants. I have raised beds and then raised side gardens which would render this device useless to me. Same with the other hobby gardeners I know.

I always imagined something with long spindly legs that would cut, inject or spray things that it identified as weeds by leaves. For me, the weeds that are the most trouble are those close to or mixed in with plants. Anything on its own isn't that hard to pull out.

One workaround is that I hope that it can climb up and down slopes that lead to the raised beds.

Does it detect cliffs or edges and avoid falling down?

Roombas do, it would be weird if this new iteration didn't

Roombas have to deal with stairs while this thing will probably get it's underside covered in mud (especially since it has that unshielded trimmer) and is supposed to run only inside a fenced area, so I doubt it has any provisions for that.

My raised beds are between 200-800mm (2-3' for the highest ones) - I'd need quite the slopes for most of them!

Easiest way to do it is to put layers of wet newspaper then black mulch. I left it for a month and it's as if the weeds were never there. I made holes in the mulch and planted some veges, they are doing great (except for the Shiso which something ate).

This is a great idea. Growing up my parents used black plastic on our fairly large garden. Black mulch seems much more aesthetically pleasing.

Plus if we're talking about black hardwood mulch, it'll improve the soil as it decomposes.

The bit that shouldn't surprise me but still does, is the volume change. Add 6 ish cubic metres of mulch and 5 years later is a thin layer of soil comprising maybe 1-2m.

You do know you can buy weed barrier fabric and cover the beds. When you plant you put holes in the barrier where your plant goes. Work well for a few people I know and it's similar price to mulching every season.

Mulch worked for me but I am using pots at the moment.

I do that. Still lots of weeds directly around the plant. Which I guess the bot isn't going to pull anyway. Hm.

How long did you leave it before planting?

My garden was literally only weeds (our house is my wife's grandparents and the house had sat mainly abandoned for about 3 years when we moved in). After doing the newspaper and mulch technique and leaving it for about 6 weeks the weeds had all decomposed into soil and haven't come back.

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