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Comment by taylorfinley | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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 :) ?...

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.

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

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.

the finger on the monkey paw curls

your slugs now shoot lasers

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Try Fiskars, they make light but sturdy gardening equipment

Slug lazers ~= small flock of ducks

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! :>

Ah, biological warfare.

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.

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