Open Source Farming Robot | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Farming Robot

farm.bot

409 pointsantoinec227 comments

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.

This is a for small hipster raised bed farming in back yard. Maybe it doesn't have to scale to a size of a commercial farm

As a fellow backyard raised bed hipster, part of the point for me is going out and tending it. I struggle to see the value in this unless it’s about scaling.

You will tend the robot instead.

Ah, the Minecraft Modpack methodology.

When you start off playing Stardew Valley but end up playing Factorio/Satisfactory.

One personal (and open source) favourite of mine is Mindustry. I also heard of shapez.io.

I get automatic watering, especially in arid climates, but planting and weed plucking is excessive imo.

But automatic watering is a solved problem. You can set up an automatic drip irrigation system very cheaply.

For a small bed like the one in the demonstration, surely that's more simply managed with a drip hose and maybe a timer?

Drip hoses are also better from a water consumption point of view since it goes straight to the soil— you don't lose any to runoff or evaporation.

Large farms put the hoses in the ground - the water never touches the air (well I assume some will seep to the surface, but not much), instead it is applied only close to the roots. You need to be very careful to apply your seeds just above the hose, but this is a solved problem: modern farming can place each seed to within 2cm of where intended over large fields even when the tractor is planting 50 rows at a time at 20km/h.

For me, playing with tech is part of the reason I have a backyard farm. So far I've just played with very basic things like sunken hose irrigation with timers hooked up to a rain gauge so it only waters when there's no rain, but I'd love to have the time to look more into the robotics side of things.

For those of us who sling CRUD sites all day long, the opportunity to dig into more machine/computer interaction is just fun.

Fair enough! I work at a robotics company, and I already feel guilt for not putting more effort into my existing homeassistant and networking setup. But if you were wanting to scratch an itch, I could definitely picture this being rewarding.

As a tech-crazed wanna-be hipster gardener, the value is pretending to do it "better" than the backyard raised bed hipsters.

Observe: "Using the manual controls, you can move FarmBot and operate its tools and peripherals in real-time. Scare birds away while at work, take photos of your veggies, turn the lights on for a night time harvest, or simply impress your friends and neighbors with a quick demo."

Maybe you wouldn't get a garden otherwise if you've got no skill, no experience living on a farm. This way you get to have a garden without know how to do it and without a choir part like watering regularly. Now you can water whenever you feel like it.

Same - I enjoy working in my garden because it's a break from my office tech job!

Robot aside, the UI to plan your planting is pretty great though.

I’m working on a different farming robot. Since my office is at the farm and half of my work is doing something outside with the machine, it’s a pretty idyllic setting for a job!

I thought the same thing. I could care less about the robot but a good garden planning app would be nice and let you track when you water, plant, harvest/ yield of crop from year to year

An app can't tell you that. You need to get out and observe every day. That's the fun of growing plants and raising animals.

Some day I hope everyone has a backyard farm to supply at least some of their food. Some of those people will need assistance to do it.

Community gardens.

This! I started bookmarking community gardens in Oakland. There’s quite a few and I hope more space can be allocated for them in the future!

My dream is to make gardens under geodesic domes. In UK there is Eden project with 2 domes: one has mediterranean climate and another tropical. Imagine being able to grow mangoes and pineapples almost anywhere (it maybe too expensive in some climates, but maybe just growing strawberries there would be nice). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWr67v620kY

I'd love to figure out how to do this in such a way that some or all of the warmth for them could come from waste-heat sources. Seems like such a waste to build a dome for growing local food and then have to heat it through the night with conventional fuels.

On a side note, check out forest gardening, namely "Plants for a future" is an excellent reference/book pfaf.orgyou, the author whom I had the luck to meet had a "huge" garden nearby in Cornwall

You've described most of Eastern Europe for most of the last 100 years and many parts of Asia. I came from a Polish city of 100,000, and everybody I knew (who didn't completely surround themselves by concrete) grew at least some type of fruits and vegetables in their yards, no matter the size. We knew the next big disturbance is just around the corner. Outside of vegetables and fruits directly planted in our yards, we also raised pork, and at different times, chicken, turkey, ducks. Our neighbours raised rabbits. Most people "leased" a small plot on the outskirts of the city (in our case for strawberries). Community gardens were everywhere. Now, things are slowly starting to change to mimick the West. People are even starting to grow lawns for some reason. Sad state of affairs. It seems humans believe that progress means you outsource all of the labor to somebody or something else. In my opinion, the labor itself, is the lesson. The folks that need assistance in their gardens would generally get it from family, friends, and neighbours.

That's exactly what I have and I'm telling you, it's still impractical. One, my greenhouse is a 24x13' footprint (which is pretty much the minimum useable with for a walk-in), with 3 bed rows 16' long, 2 or 4' wide. So I'd need 3 robot setups. Beds are long and skinny to facilitate human ergonomics. The shown examples are way too wide for raised beds, unless they are the walk-on type. So I'd still benefit from a robot which could straddle the bed and be easy to move from one bed to another.

Maybe you need 1 robot with wide legs?

It's open source and designed to be modular/expandable. What's stopping you from building one to fit your needs?

Here's some pictures[0] of people building larger scale ones:

- 10x20' inside a greenhouse

- 1.5x18m outdoor

[0] - https://forum.farmbot.org/t/photo-contest-post-your-best-far...

> small hipster raised bed farming in back yard

As a small hipster raised bed farmer (or rather, gardener), I actually looked into this at one point - the $1500 price tag put me off of it really quick. There's no way that kind of investment makes sense unless you're planning to sell the vegetables to recoup your investment - and it's doubtful that the machine will realistically last more than five years or so, so you'll have to replace it at some point in the fairly near future.

I think you pay to get hands off garden.

In that case, you're better off just buying your produce at the grocery store.

But you can watch it grow.

i mean, how many hobbies can you say that about? most of them i imagine.

hobbies are about tinkering and learning. we usually put far more in financially then we get returned financially. hobbies are expensive.

Like home made beer. Unless stuff at the store is really bad and/or super expensive. But in terms of gardening I'd bet on hydroponics.

i don’t think this is an investment kind of project. it’s a hobby, more for people who enjoy the tinkering as much as some people enjoy playing in their own gardens which often costs far more than they’re getting in return via food. simply an early open source iteration with hopes for community improvements as more people with varying needs begin to contribute.

this seems like its definitely not a project yet for people who don’t enjoy that as a hobby.

Slightly off topic, but what is it about raised beds? Why not till and fertilize the soil you already have?

Texas checking in -- the dirt in my backyard is full of clay and totally unsuitable for growing anything other than grass and weeds. Many places are like this.

That makes sense, and maybe I'm sweeping aside many places similar without thinking about them. In the Midwest I've always had good luck in the ground.

The back loves raised beds compared to the alternative.

Finally got a home and am finding the same thing here in central Texas. At least with the crap soil the builders use to form the land around the foundation. My plan is to attempt to grow more deep rooted plants so their roots can break up the soil and die off when I trim them. Then aeration and topsoil composting. Still a work in progress so I have no idea if it'll work.

The clay soil usually has a low organic matter content. So bringing mulch, grass clippings etc. does improve several key factors for the plants to thrive. The problem with putting a layer of rotting grass/weeds on the top is that at least in some locations it will make a perfect slug/snail farm. So I prefer to burry it in shallow pits/trenches. Also probably any preferably dense plant cover protects the top layer from being backed by the sun and becoming brick-like.

There are a few advantages: the beds are raised do you don't have to bend over as far to tend them. The beds make it obvious where the place to walk is. The beds mean instead of rows of plants you have a contained solid mess which in turn means more plants per area (this is good for some plants, bad for others). Tilling is bad for soil and should be avoided whenever possible, the beds make it easier to not disturb the soil in ways that need tilling to fix. The beds allow you to have the type of soil best for the type of plant you are trying to grow - fertilizer doesn't change soil types.

Nothing magical about it, there are some advantages to raised beds, but other than the ergonomics everything can be done in any other type of garden if you try.

Why is tilling bad for the soil? Genuinely curious as I've seen it as an option for my terrible salty clay soil at my house.

Because it destories the root structure built up in the ground over the years. Those roots then break down quickly, and in turn the whole microbe profile is different. Sometimes tilling is still the best thing to do, but it isn't a good thing and should be avoided.

On a different note, tilling also costs large amounts of energy. The less tilling your do, the less CO2 you are putting into the atmosphere (even if you do the tilling by hand with a shovel you are still emitting more CO2 than if you just sat in your easy-chair)

>Because it destories the root structure built up in the ground over the years. Those roots then break down quickly, and in turn the whole microbe profile is different. Sometimes tilling is still the best thing to do, but it isn't a good thing and should be avoided.

Does this still apply when talking about farming? I just started growing food this year, but once I've harvested the first crop and am planting the second crop of the season, the roots in the ground are surely going to break down quickly in any case, because I've harvested all of their tops, no?

>even if you do the tilling by hand with a shovel you are still emitting more CO2 than if you just sat in your easy-chair

I'm sorry, what? By that logic I should also never exercise.

It applies to farming in general. You really need to consult an agronomist for better answers (which can be very specific/different depending on which part of a field you are asking about )

I was hoping you would notice the exercise connection. I don't have answers to that, just an interesting consideration.

"Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don't need it: if you are sick you should not take it." Henry Ford

> Does this still apply when talking about farming?

I think many farmers have moved towards using various types of something called “cover crops” rather than tilling. These cover crops have different impacts depending on which are used: some have incredibly prolific rooting systems that dig deep and break up the soil on their own; some pull nutrients from deep in the soil and grow massive green above ground so farmers let these grow to pre-seed levels and then plow it over, and leave it so it decomposes and re-releases those same nutrients to the surface, and also draws all the micro biome critters in which then fertilize the soil even more; some plants fix nitrogen levels and some bloom various types of flowers which pull in pollinators. Some do a premise mix of multiple types of cover crops.

I think tilling is still done sometimes but it’s only for certain situations but is avoided most of the time these days.

I just got into gardening a few years ago, so I’m still learning most of this as I go along, but from what i’ve read, tilling is phased out except for certain situations.

I can say with absolute certainty that by my third year of working on soil, my gardens soil absolutely does not need tilling at all, it’s fluffy and soft for at least two feet down with plenty of life in there. But much of the surrounding area is pretty clay tough. Honestly it was super easy, just needed like a season of building the soil properly.

Another Ive noticed is, many of our home/hobby gardening techniques which our parents generation adopted were really only useful for enormous factory level farms and were actually not good for small or home gardens. These two situations need entirely different things but marketing and such over the years really steered that generation into doing a lot of the wrong things.

I don’t know your situation, tilling may be the best option for you, but it also may be to just dump a bunch of compost on top, let it settle, then plant some rooting cover crops and let it do it’s thing for a couple months. The latter may be much much healthier for your soil.

I guess it depends on a plant, but it's not only about roots. Top layer of soil has highest concentration of organic matter and it builds up over time when plants and possibly animal excrements decompose. By tiling you kill fertility a bit, that's why most farms have to use fertilisers.

It disrupts the fungal life and dries it out, while also increasing erosion and weed pressure. It’s not that you can’t ever till, but it’s generally to be avoided.

In the case of clay, deep mulch will do wonders, and the earthworms will gently improve the soil over time.

I'm not sure if you know, but is there a way to promote earthworms in my soil? It's pretty compacted after the build and apparently they don't like that, so I'm trying to aerate and let my grass grow longer to break up what it can before I trim and let the roots die. For the garden I'm also planning on planting plants with deep roots, like sunflowers, to improve the soil.

Where do you live? Earthworms are not native everywhere and they can be a harmful invasive species if introduced to the wrong place.

If you have a new house, developments are horible, just enough soil to grow grass. You might be stuck buying good compost and soil and tilling that in deep, then letting grass grow for a few years before trying anything more.

Seems to be the case I'll have to play the long game. They bring in this disgusting but shapeable soil to surround the foundation out here in central Texas. I remember growing up finding earthworms and fishing all the time, so they should be native.

> should be native.

The word you’re looking for is “naturalized”. Not native, but they’re already there, so...

Hm why do you make the distinction? Is the implication that the earthworms were brought in at some point or does native not work as a word in this context?

Maybe try making something like a "broadfork" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadfork

Also, try asking a coffee shop for leftover ground and sprinkle it around...

This broadfork is interesting. I have a garden fork that could probably serve the same purpose. I'll give it a shot.

Also thanks for the recommendation of using coffee grounds. I have a couple local shops nearby I think would be willing to offload that on to me haha.

Yes. As someone growing and raising between 60 and 100% (depending on year) of my family's food on a run-through clay and hardpan soil (150 years of cotton and tobacco did it), I can definitely say that you can turn compacted and dead clay around. Like the parent said - deep mulch is one way. In my case, leaves, grass clippings, forest duff, soiled animal bedding, etc. Really anything organic. You effectively want to "build" the topsoil, which will over time (4-7 years depending on what you're starting with) create enough organic matter to entice insects, earthworms, fungal growth (critical to soil health), voles and moles. All of these creatures will aerate the soil for you. No work required. If you want to do a test, throw a tarp down (or some other large covering) over an area, and check back on it in a week or two. You should have some moles already going to work on aerating your soil, and in turn, you should see at least some earthworm activity.

Also, don't forget the weeds. Almost all of the plants humans label as weeds, have very deep sub-soil penetrating roots (most are also more nutritious than the stuff we've bred for us or other animals to eat). If you want to rebuild your soil, let the weeds grow and then either use them for compost which you'll later top-dress your soil with, or just chop them and leave them be for the cover crop effect, or work them in slightly, up to you.

> If you want to rebuild your soil, let the weeds grow and then either use them for compost which you'll later top-dress your soil with, or just chop them and leave them be for the cover crop effect, or work them in slightly, up to you.

This has been my primary approach. Letting the grass and "weeds" grow relatively tall then trimming them down every month or so, letting the clippings rest where they are more or less.

I live in an area which has been urban for ages. The soil, more than a few inches down, is full of toxic chemicals, including but not limited to lead.

Raised bed, you know what you get.

I always thought these folks might be onto something, though I'm not sure how successful the approach has been: https://www.opensourceecology.org/

I follow them for some time, they seem to be doing something, but I don't understand their grand vision.

I've been following them (for quite some time actually) and I admire their vision, but from what I've observed, they have run out of steam in the past few years.

Also their approach is great if you have a metal shop and lots of raw materials and components ready to go, but for their goal of helping mechanized developing countries, I think it falls flat. The first rule of pricing hardware is economy of scale wins. Being able to fabricobble a farm tractor from a Toyota pickup is way more valuable than building one from scratch using steel box beams.

I think their approach would be better served by creating an "API standard" for mechanical interfaces, like an ISO standard of sorts, so you could fabricobble your prime mover, your bucket loader, your hydraulics, from whatever you happen to have, and be able to swap out with anyone else's peripheral. Like the IDDS, but more down to Earth :) :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Docking_System_S...

I think this is geared at personal, specifically small-scale backyard farms.

https://youtu.be/3mrvd0B6DuQ ?

Re the weeding robot -- you may be thinking of https://tertill.com

iRobot founders' new thing. Small, and undercapitalized, but promising.

Neat, and promising, though not the one I was thinking of.

I think it might have been this one, Acorn by Twisted Fields:

https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsyEIgKVM5E

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

Hey that’s my robot, thank you for sharing it!

I just published a new article to go with our latest video. This one takes a closer look at the vehicle subsystems.

https://community.twistedfields.com/t/a-closer-look-at-acorn...

Edit: just submitted it as an article on HN if anyone wants to give it their vote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27634450

Tertill is cool and all, but for a new garden, you still have to weed until the payplants are big enough to trigger "collisions". There's no magic in sensing: It just kills new growth.

It also looks like you need to give it room to move around? Look at all that space that could be used for more veggies!

I'm guessing some veggies need to be planted that far apart so there's enough nutrients in the ground for all of them to grow fully

Yeah, seems to assume you're going to put protectors around the 'good' plants or something at first. Still, I could see some interesting swarm behavior opportunities for the right types of plants and growth stages...

You can just surround the new plants with the plant guards that come with the robot.

And probably in mining too

How about something like this:

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?

Not the worst idea, though IIRC that style of robot needs a fair amount of tension in the wires in order to minimize droop.

> there are no straight lines on a farm.

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.

agree completely. if it's for personal farming--it's too expensive because tending to a handful of plants is trivial.

>I want something half or a quarter of that. Able to scoop 50 lbs of dirt, repeatedly, and dig holes/trenches.

https://www.toro.com/en/professional-contractor/compact-util...

I’m designing an open source farming robot (Acorn by Twisted Fields) and I’m looking at doing Charles Dowding’s no-dig farming method. Instead of tillage they drop more compost on top of the beds each season. In that case it would be super helpful for our robot to be able to scoop from a pile of compost and distribute it over the beds. You think there’s a lot of value in that? I’m still mulling it over.

Here’s a nice overview of a no-dig farm: https://youtu.be/u79tiVcj8bY

Yes. There are plenty of things that need to be spread on farms. I have a friend who made huge piles of bio-char for spreading in his hops field. Hops fields are full of poles supporting the trellis that supports the plants, so there's a lot to dodge. Doing it with the tractor bucket required a lot of manual touch up after. Also, in landscaping and construction, the ability to move soil, mulch, and gravel autonomously would be extremely helpful. Spreading it evenly would be icing on the cake.

This is $6-8k used and probably out of scope.

All of his numbers are way low, though. Good luck finding a running tractor for $500-$800, and used loaders are $10-$15k, not $2-$3k. $2k will get you a new set of loader tires.

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.....

Which is why this product is named "gardenbot"?

if read the home page:

"At home Grow food for yourself, your family, and your community by installing FarmBot on a raised bed, urban rooftop, or in a small greenhouse at home. Fully automated, hyper-local food production has never been so attainable."

This is the antithesis of commercial farming.

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.

> This device is going to gum up

You say that like this device hasn't been around for years, accumulating revisions, upgrades, and user stories.

Look at the videos. That’s an outdoor laboratory environment.

Directly from article: "And because everything is made from aluminum, stainless steel, and UV resistant ABS, FarmBot will last for years in outdoor environments."

Aluminum needs to be replaced when damaged. It won’t rust at least, but that’s only if you don’t let it touch any chemicals or other metals.

And you can’t make a robot only out of aluminum, steel, and ABS plastic. Cmon, you know better than that. All it takes is failure of one of the parts they conveniently did not mention and you have an expensive doorstop.

There are untold number of videos out there that complain about lack of sufficient grommets and conduits for vehicle trailers, resulting in predictable shorts circuits. You’d like to think these are all solved problems, but they aren’t staying solved.

> This will be like a pet turtle you have to keep flipping right side up, not like a roomba.

Having recently bought (and returned) the flagship Roomba, I struggle to see the difference between those two.

> 1 - there are no straight lines on a farm.

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...

Those rows are "straight" in a way that looks roughly right from up high, or from head height, but you can see the exact problem they're talking about in several of those pictures you linked; farms are "straight" to a few centimeters over a few tens of meters, but they're not "straight" down to sub-single centimeter deviation over 30 meters. And while it may be possible to have _some_ farms operate that way, how does this system interact with places where that won't work? What about places like the Palouse region of Washington, where you'll see farms stretching for tens of kilometers, but they have to do so over rolling hills[1]?

Large, flat, level areas aren't that common, while major-to-minor deviations from flat-and-level are very common. The grandparent comment is I believe rightly asking "how does this 'farm bot' solve the problems of real farms?" I agree, this looks less like a farm-bot and more like a "serious gardener bot", which is a different niche.

[1] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palouse_hills_northe...

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.

Slug lazers ~= small flock of ducks

Ah, biological warfare.

Not species-appropriate usually without enough roaming space and a lake .. so not for everyone :(

Btw, did I see the robot harvesting in the end? Everything else is fine, but at least this don't take away from me! :>

From what i heard, they usually destroy every green on you garden first and only after that turn to slugs.

Hens would be less destructive, I think.

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.

the finger on the monkey paw curls

your slugs now shoot lasers

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 :) ?...

Yeah I mean they are [supposed to be] testing anyway, might as well rent out the equipment during the experiment and sell the produce.

Here in the UK, allotments are currently back in fashion - garden-sized strips of land assigned to people who rent them for a small amount each year. Currently in demand again, especially in cities where flat-dwellers might not have their own garden - you can spend a few hours a week getting out of the house and getting some exercise / fresh air. A traditional allotment does take a bit of a time commitment, and of course not every day is sunny, and free allotments in some areas are very limited, so maybe combine allotments with a farming robot. Get a parcel of land, maybe a way outside town (but accessible via public transport), split it up into allotments that people can farm daily remotely or come and visit for a nice day out. The sort of thing a farm with a farm shop or pick-your-own operation could diversify into - rent out strips of land for remote users to tinker around on, handle shipping them their ripe produce for a reasonable fee.

Clever idea. How do I get my harvest once it’s ready? Does someone have to harvest the plants for me and mail them to me?

In the video on the site they show a robot arm plucking carrots out of the ground and placing them into a basket, but that might have been from one of the research basket. But shipping them to you sounds reasonable, although packaging them so they don't rot and the distance might nullify any real ecological advantage.

You could probably get a carrot token credit that you could exchange with a more local carrot supplier.

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.

Props for trying though.

Try Fiskars, they make light but sturdy gardening equipment

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.

Everyone's always bitter how technology's stepping stones fit into particular niches and manage to eek by -- providing inspiration for better systems to come when there is a proper problem and ecosystem to support them isn't enough for these types. It's like questioning the purpose and validity of the moonshot.

Well, "these types" have lived long enough to recognize that the solution proposed is itself a part of the problem. We need less robotics and hands off farming for healthy nutritious and sustainable food production, not more.

> all I really want is a slug laser

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.

> a slug-hunting robot powered by fermented slugs

Isn’t that called a duck?

Ha.

But actually, if most people weren't so averse to biological organisms, perhaps we would've had computer controlled ducks, rats, hens and other small animals by now.

Why bother reinventing the whole thing when you could just replace (part of) their brains.

Experimentation would be pretty gruesome though.

Ducks already eat slugs, no BMI required.

I dream of cyber-moles.

Seriously. If you've ever watched utility crews installing or repairing underground fiber, and then had moles colonize your yard, there is only one logical conclusion: silly humans, you are doing it wrong.

The problem is e-coli (and a few similar things). Animal poop is full of it, and we don't want that in our food supply. Machines don't leave e-coli behind to contaminate our food like biological organisms do. (hint wash your fresh food!)

Hmmmm. Let me start by saying that I've been eating unwashed fresh food (plant and animal both) since I was crawling (as have most of my friends and family members) without any incidence of health issues. In fact, one of the things I couldn't understand after I moved from Poland to the US, is how come all of the American kids have routine gut and intestinal issues. Specifically, what is a "stomach flu" that these kids keep talking about?

I've brought near-dead piglets seemingly back to good health by giving them a spoonful of rich compost, almost certain to be teaming with e-coli among all sorts of other microbes considered to be pathogenic.

>Animal poop is full of it, and we don't want that in our food supply.

Animal poop is already in our commercial food supply, especially vegetables as you alluded to. Hell, quite a lot of rat and mice meat is allowed in our commercial meats here in the US.

>Machines don't leave e-coli behind to contaminate our food like biological organisms do.

No, instead machines leave behind oil, gas, coolant residues to contaminate our food and soils.

E-coli is only a problem if you don't embed yourself and your gut with as many other strains of various microbes as you possibly can. If you're HIV positive or immunocompromised, then for sure, wash your fresh food and everything else you ingest, for everybody else, don't worry about e-coli.

I don't know about Poland, but France has about ten times the food poising cases per year vs the US. That figure is total, but per capita. Most of the time e-coli isn't a big deal, but it can be.

I agree oil from machines isn't something you want either.

what's wrong with language-controlled humans?

oh right, humans can't be property

I use cabbage plants strategically placed, left to go to seed, all the snails hit onme them so you either watch or pick em up and throw them on the compost (or in the pond for the fish?) I heard comfrey leaves can serve the same purpose...

> 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?

You could make them pack hunters, with the expectation that 8-12 separate slug/roach lasers would end up focused on a target slug at a time.

That way you'd be performing target recognition from multiple angles and mis-classifications would tend to only result in the not-slug being hit with 10-20% power.

Which is the problem with they mosquito shooting turret, as well.

I hate mosquitos as much as slugs - but I do not like people to loose their eyesight over it.

There would have to be many reliable savety mechanism, before this can become a thing.

Otherwise I will have trained one, to target ticks 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.

If you're willing to share, I'd be interested in knowing who you work for...

I work for Blue River Technology, now fully owned by John Deere.

Obligatory: Any opinions I express on HN are my own and not representative of my employer.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27634450

I think that looks a lot more like the right direction.

I would say that the precision part of Ag robotics is the most important part and the success of this project is likely going to be resting on that entirely.

It boils down to something like:

1. Can you sense and classify (i.e. Deep learning based vision)

2. After that, can you turn a pixel into field coordinates. (Pose-> gps/encoder/imu/etc)

3. Can you act accurately/quick/effectively enough (kill/treat mechanism, electromechnical design)

Then it's can you do it reliably enough. Then it's can you do it fast enough. Then its can you do it cost effectively enough.

Farmers won't mess with anything not reliable. They generally aren't interested in anything with worse performance than existing processes, even if greener/cheaper (unless they are significantly so). They most especially will not mess with anything that doesn't generate value in their eyes and they are very good at understanding what generates value and what doesn't.

That all makes sense, thank you.

Personally I’ve been really pushing for “community supported development”, where a community crowd funds an idea. Like the Godot video game engine or Octoprint. We’re applying to non profit fiscal hosts now. (I expect we may fork the project and have a for profit version in the future, but I’m all about maintaining a complete open source system as a non profit project. See the Dronecode foundation for an example of a split profit/non-profit project.)

I want to have a robot for myself and for others that can manage a one to five acre plot using high volume organic production along the lines of methods popularized by Eliot Coleman, JM Fortier, or Charles Dowding. I’m leaning towards no-dig (Dowding) but it will take a lot of experimentation to see what really works best.

But I say all this because I think a lot of companies are going to be focused on meeting market demand for existing farming needs. I’m hoping that for our non profit work we are pushing the envelope for highly ecological development, supported by enthusiastic believers in our mission. I’ve been learning about reduced till and no till agriculture and it seems super promising for a robot like ours. My hope is that long term, we can help build a system that allows these techniques to scale.

That said, the need for a precision vision system is even greater in this scenario. There’s going to be a lot of variety in what our system needs to identify and do! Luckily vision is the thing I really enjoy learning. I think if I can drive prototyping and I can get a broader community going, we have a good shot of getting a whole system going. At the very least I think our open source vehicle is very good, and will be a solid base platform for people once we release the V2 research vehicle.

See my vision learning project I’ve been working on the last couple years: https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/

If you have that much excess power I wonder if you could solve the precision water problem with tanks that top up by wringing it out of atmosphere in humid climates.

Perhaps cooled coils: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator

Wind power to shake the water off

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.

This uses Elixir with the Nerves IoT platform. Jose Valim blogged about it last year: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/08/20/embedded-elixir-at-f...

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.

[0] - https://farm.bot/blogs/news/the-farmbot-whitepaper

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.

weeding and pest control is where the real utility for a farm robot would come in.

Yes, good point. Does this open source farm robot spray pesticide?

Shouldn't need too, if you know where you've planted then you can kill any plant that's growing in an unknown place.

For all the other types of pest, you really don't want to be automatically spraying that, you're one software bug away from having a very bad day.

If that's the case then plastics from your irrigation system would also ruin your environment.

Metals (although in tiny portions) are part of ourselves but plastics are not.

Don’t think a hose that costs $10 is comparable to everything going into these contraptions that cost $1.5k

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 .

"having a robot" is not a problem statement

> "having a robot" is not a problem statement

It is if what you want is a robot.

Would be useful to see some performance metrics, and, service history.

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?

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.

Well, my understanding (and common advice) is actually not to water the leaves at all if possible as that has no benefit apart from helping diseases set in.

Depends on the plant.

Leaves absorb water, too, fwiw.

You can damage the plant if you water leaves in bright sunshine, because water will act as a lens and leaves will get burned. Otherwise I'd follow nature: plants get water when it rains, so leaves should have some water too.

Watering at nightfall when the ambient temperature is below 70F is a recipe for rot as well.

When it's cold, you water in the morning. When it's hot, you water at night.

I didn't know thank you.

Depending on the species it may make sense to raise the humidity in the air (that's especially valid for indoor plants or tropical plants in greenhouses, hence misting). But watering the leaves is not needed and is pretty much useless to the plant. In nature of course plants get wet under the rain but, as mentioned, this helps diseases (moulds, mildew, virii, etc) take hold so in general it's best avoided if at all possible.

Just use an automated irrigation controller with misters.

I think humans moving further from soil is unhealthy in the long run, but this looks fun, like a reverse farming simulator.

Why?

Why unhealthy?

Yes, sorry should have been more clear.

Np, this https://qz.com/993258/dirt-has-a-microbiome-and-it-may-doubl... And in general it's about being close to nature. Traveling between a flat and an office, sitting in metal or concrete boxes and connecting via messengers is a surrogate or a simulation of life. Again, can be fun, but gotta step outside once in a while, touch plants, smell the living air.

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...

Agree, I haven't thought of that.

That’s not that true and the robot will hardly help.

The reason people don’t do it is that commercial farming is so efficient once you factor in costs growing your own is not cheaper than buying from supermarket.

It's not really about the cost. We are working on a greenhouse with raised beds. Between parts, tools, and piles of topsoil, I think we are $2-3k in (upstate NY). It was never gonna break even. It's a fun project, and it gives you unbelievable freshness and quality.

Robot might help in a greenhouse setting but outdoors it's just gonna get mudded up and get fine, abrasive clay dust in everything. Needs to be way more ruggedized.

Don’t disagree with any of that however all the effort is before the robotics gets involved.

People don't do it because each hour you spend in your garden is an hour you could have spent doing something else. The problem is not that you have to spend half an hour a day to do it, the problem is that it takes weeks of spending half an hour a day to get anything. And as a beginner, there is a good chance that you're going to screw something up.

A lot of people prefer spending half an hour a day learning italian, or rock climbing, or whatever...

It’s not half and hour a day. More like an hour a week. If you don’t enjoy the process of gardening you shouldn’t do it. Over-engineered robotic solutions for small plots are never going to make much sense.

Nah it doesn't take anywhere near that amount of time to raise some produce. Maybe a half hour total per week, if that.

Some stuff is easier to grow, some is harder, but for example I barely did anything on my strawberry patch this year other than picking them when they got ripe. I'd say I spent maybe 15 minutes a month on the strawberries.

Now if you're trying to grow a lot of stuff then the time investment might increase but most backyard gardens don't take up that much time once you've planted everything.

> barely anybody does it.

I suspect this varies by location and demographics. Being an older guy living in rural areas, almost everyone I know grows at least some veggies and fruit. Not everyone makes it a major part of their lives, but I'd be hard-pressed to find almost anyone I know who doesn't have at least a couple tomato plants, or some berry bushes.

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.

https://squarefootgardening.org/2020/05/watering-methods-for...

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.

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 don't know the exact details. But I can find out, if you know someone that might be interested in such a project.

"My dad, who I copied on this email had a quick question regarding hiring a programmer to write a small program for a farm equipment control system" is what I responded to.

You're on a forum filled with bored software engineers, posting details right here is a pretty good idea ;)

If contract work isn't against the rules for them (not sure), and the job is otherwise reasonable (feasible, not too open ended, not throwing up giant red flags) I bet he would get some bites by posting to the monthly "who is hiring" threads too.

Depending on the details of the request I might be willing to do it, more because I think it might be interesting to work on a "farm equipment control system" than anything else. Coincidentally I gave notice at my job a week ago so I'll have some free time coming up.

Okay, great. I just emailed him to find out if he hired someone. If he hasn't if there a way to private message on here? I can forward your contact info to him.

My email is in my profile (i.e. click on my username).

great, thank you. I forwarded him your contact info.

I appreciate it :)

Just noticed HeyLaughingBoy's post too, from his description I'd say there's a pretty good chance his experience is more on point than mine (it is a bit hard to tell from the limited description here though).

Not to torpedo my chances, but you might want to forward his contact info on too.

I get that.

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.

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.

Agree. Long-run, a drone type machine may well become successful (flying around zapping weeds) but this is way over-engineered for what it does.

Drones are fun, but there might be no need to fight weeds so much. They help plants get stronger and kill off weak ones. Farms are overrun with pests and weeds because ecosystem is incomplete and natural cycles are not followed. Some type of permaculture approach like Fukuoka farming could be a more robust alternative to zapping.

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.

Pretty cool, but isn't that more a gardening robot than a farm robot? I wonder how it handles weeding chores...

What if you had a robot gantry that could attach itself to existing centre pivot systems to do seeding and tillage?

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?

That's interesting, it's a large CNC machine and not a mobile robot. That makes sense.

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.

I don't think most people want to turn their yard into a serious farm. This is great for backyard gardens. I'd get a smaller table top version for my apartment.

Yeah, I too wonder how small you can currently get with the smallest Express version they offer.

I'd love to get something like this into my apartment, around 0.5x1 meters in size, and with a refillable water tank.

No it’s still pretty useless. If you want a legitimate backyard garden, the rain gutter grow system is the way to go. No robot, no electricity, no weeding, automated watering.

TBH for my indoor garden watering it by hand is fine (really good for my mental health honestly) I just like the idea of playing with the robot.

Are you talking about the system where you put buckets above a rain gutter which has a float valve to set the level? E.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyOIRVjatdg

That's actually quite clever! Though I'm not sure how they avoid the gutters from turning into algae blooming, mosquito-breeding cesspools. :p

Edit: Oh I guess you can just cover the gutter in plastic and ensure there is enough water throughput to stay fairly fresh: https://permaculturefoodforest.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/rain...

I don't think it's a problem to make this robot wider and longer if there will be demand

The problem with this type of robot is that it doesn't scale that well price-wise compared to a mobile type. You'll need longer rails on the sides and the gantry will start sagging after a certain length. Meanwhile something on wheels or tracks has a slightly higher initial investment but has almost zero extra cost for driving a little bit further.

I see, thank you for explaining. Wheeled robot would take more space between plants and how would it carry a water hose without damaging plants?

Looks cool but the cost/time to set this up seems way overkill for how small the plots are.

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.

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.

I wonder if it would be viable to set this (their Express version) up on a 1x0.5m table in an apartment.

I'd love something like this, and with a refillable water tank.

From what I can see, this just waters the plants? Is there any weed control (e.g. spraying with super-heated Clove oil)?

Yes there is.

It has something like a tiny drill on video from 0:40 https://youtube.com/watch?v=qwSbWy_1f8w

My brother showed me this, a couple of years ago.

Cool stuff.

The only missing thing to this is a gun. To automatically shoot at random animals interested in your garden.

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.

Mobile electric fencing is your friend, here. No need for guns.

It’s not very “open source” when your datasets aren’t available for download (unless that has changed?)

  * sudo apt install farmbot
  * farmbot --sew strawberries
  * farmbot --pick straweberries

Paging TaylorAlexander... what's your take?

Look: if they aren't using lasers to shoot the weeds, I'm not interested.

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.

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