https://community.twistedfields.com/t/march-2022-update-simu...
A common question is “okay but what does it do?”
The answer is that right now it doesn’t do any farming. To do farming we need to develop tools. Tools are highly specific to the farming process used, and our machine is unlike a tractor or a human hand as it has less power than a tractor, more power than a human, and doesn’t get bored or require any marginal input costs like human labor does. This means existing tools aren’t exactly right and it’s going to take a bit of work to get that sorted.
Because tools are such a complex part of the system, our plan is to finalize and release our autonomous rover without any tools to early adopters, and then work with the community to experiment and design tools together. Remember that this is an open source research project and we encourage and will assist anyone in going in to production on their own machines, so early adopters designing tools will ensure they have a complete system they can manufacture that works for their farming context.
The end goal is a system which can help in every step of the farming process in a regenerative organic farming system. This includes clearing the rows of any cover crop, planting seeds and starts, thinning seedlings and pulling weeds, dealing with pests, harvesting, and resetting for a new rotation.
It’s a lot of work as I’m doing most of the design, engineering, and fabrication work myself as well as all video production and blog work, but as I’ve mentioned I’m finalizing two new videos and one of the new videos is a new easier to produce format. I got a little too in to fancy video production with four locations and multiple angles on one of the videos and realized I need to dial it back and produce simpler more frequent videos.
You’re welcome to follow me on mastodon where I post photos of some of the latest work, as well as personal stuff. Here’s a picture of the brand new vehicle we have developed that is our production intent system, as well as new electronics which have just finished production and are in transit to us now. Thanks so much for taking a look!