
FarmBot: Open-source automated farming machine - gustoffen
http://wiki.farmbot.it/
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ximeng
This strawberry picker was in the news last couple of days:

[http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/09/26/business/latest-...](http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/09/26/business/latest-
robot-can-pick-strawberry-fields-forever/#.UkRjXIZ9t5Y)

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weavie
I would definitely be interested in some form of 'gardening bot'. This but at
a smaller scale just for my garden.

At a smaller scale, I can sow the seed myself. I can harvest myself. What I do
need automated is the areas where I consistently fail when trying to grow my
own vegetable patch. Watering is the main one. Just having a sensor to detect
when to switch on and off the hose pipe would probably save most of my crops.
Slug control would be another - something to detect when a slug gets to close
and zaps em with (preferably) a laser.

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yellowbkpk
Ever since the Telegarden [0] shut down I've had an idea like this in the back
of my mind but not solid enough to give it a name or draw plans. I'm glad
someone is making it happen!

[0] [http://www.usc.edu/dept/garden/](http://www.usc.edu/dept/garden/)

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stretchwithme
Eventually, robots will be growing all kinds of food. The roofs of our houses
will be covered with gardens.

They'll even inspect plants at regular intervals and remove bugs. They'll
decide when fruit is ready to pick and share all the data with systems that
buy, transport and use produce.

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prawn
Half-baked pie in the sky musing:

What about a spindly-legged robot (picture those tall things in Half Life, or
the killers in War of the Worlds) that wasn't constrained by rails? It used a
camera to identify where to safely step, returned to a base to charge (solar
on shed roof nearby) or replenish its (small) water and seed supply.

Sensors helped it check water moisture and know when to rewater. In its
travels, it got a picture of which regions had the most sun, so it knew what
would grow best and where.

Wonder if it could (with camera or sensor) identify what was growing where to
help with decisions, or even remove upcoming weeds before they got
established?

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Bjorkbat
Some input as a former organic farmer: wheels.

But a start is a good start, and really wheels can be a hassle, seeing as
tractors can't operate on muddy soil (well, shouldn't).

I'm actually somewhat glad someone is doing this. I had a similar idea way-
back-when, for gardening, but I had no idea how to handle the issue of having
the seeder/weeder/watering device climb over taller vegetables, such as
tomatoes, which can get up to 4ft tall, or the mighty sweet corn plant, which
can get up to 6ft and higher, at least not without making the thing ugly as
all hell or severely manhandle the crop. This is an attractive looking step in
a good direction.

I'll follow you on Facebook and occasionally remark about the hell that is
trying to grow vegetables in East Texas.

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eksith
This seems to work on a very similar principle to automated industrial cutters
like those you would in factories slicing fabric or even automated drawing
machines or dock cranes.

Two tracks on either side with one main gantry and tool in the middle. The
design is very simple (which is very good) and I think the principles are
straightforward enough for the DIYer to begin tinkering almost immediately. 3D
printers, while getting cheaper, aren't as cheap as inkjet printers and until
that becomes are reality, making parts will be a bit expensive.

But for a small green house version I can see someone using furniture drawer
tracks or screen door tracks from the nearest hardware shop and begin building
one of their own. Someone with basic woodworking skills can put together a
basic version fairly quickly. Arduino programming is also pretty simple that a
novice can get working quickly. A motor controller board will really help with
a smaller version.

I especially like the design for the Crop Circle Bot :
[http://wiki.farmbot.it/file/detail/Sketch%2C%20FarmBot%20for...](http://wiki.farmbot.it/file/detail/Sketch%2C%20FarmBot%20for%20Crop%20Circles%20%2809-20-2013%29.pdf)

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smoorman1024
Really interesting idea. I could see this being used to remotely manage a farm
from anywhere in the world. Picture a dashboard with hookups to your video
feeds and statistics. When it's time to harvest take it out of the ground put
it in a hopper and wait for pickup.

Not to mention the impact of testing different field configurations in varying
climates all over the world. Whether the robotic design of the system is cost
efficient or not, we should be at least collecting and sharing this data now.

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Debugreality
I'm most interested in pushing this technology forward so we can use it on the
moon or on mars. I think the moon would be a much more attractive destination
if they had a few nice big gardens growing up there...

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Qworg
I think the follow up circular design is far more efficient. A huge X-Y table
is terribly expensive in materials.

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jabits
I think x-y scalability would be easier/more versatile/easier to locate than
an ever-enlarging circumference.

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tocomment
This is really cool. If these were ever used at scale it could make organic
farming cheaper than non. For example instead of pesticides a robot like this
could pick off bugs (and or scare them away).

It could also pull weeds getting rid of the need for herbicide.

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lnanek2
The design seems fundamentally unscalable due to the rails. I've been to
farming areas and fields can go on for miles.

They could have come up with something far more powerful just by sticking it
on the front of a tractor and having some tanks/bins for consumables.

Heck, they could have even started from common irrigation systems where you
can have 400m of pipe on wheels you roll across the whole field.

I have to wonder how much farmer experience anyone behind this has and if they
even looked at current farming equipment before just scaling up a computer
printer and sticking a different end on the head.

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pampa
Dont you see? It's a robot for growing organic weed! Maybe some lettuce on the
side.

Here is an idea for a startup: Shipping container weed farm. Order one online,
plug in, insert seeds, press button.

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_mulder_

      "If you have another way to donate in mind"
    

Seems like this would be an ideal project for a kickstarter, that way at least
the project could create a more informative project page and detail exactly
how they hope to spend the money with perhaps the goal of building a prototype
in a given time-scale.

At the moment it looks a bit too much like someone's had a great idea, done a
bit of initial design and thrown together a wiki page. It doesn't seem serious
enough for me to donate at this stage.

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roryaronson
Hi, my name is Rory and I am the one behind the project.

We are working towards a crowdfunding launch in 2014 as stated on page 47 of
the white paper: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/169536137/FarmBot-Humanity-s-
Open-...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/169536137/FarmBot-Humanity-s-Open-Source-
Automated-Precision-Farming-Machine)

We've received a good amount of donations so far and will be ordering
materials for the initial design this week and next.

I'm currently recruiting other students at my local university to work on the
project, and we plan to flesh out the wiki with timelines, design files, and
progress updates soon.

Thanks for checking out the project!

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_mulder_
Thanks for clearing it up. However, I'm still not sure on what my donations
would be used for at this stage (I guess you could say a lack of transparency)
but I wish you the best of luck and hope you get enough backers to make this
work.

Could be something of REAL benefit to the world, which is more than most HN
stories can say.

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malandrew
Very cool. It would be awesome to automate as much as possible of permaculture
and everything you need to create small communities that can survive entirely
off the grid in a way that affords people plenty of free time.

People who did this might want to also check out the Global Village
Construction Set:

[http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio...](http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set)

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timdiggerm
off the grid, yet with a powered robot?

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Zikes
Plenty of off-grid power options, like solar, wind, and water.

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HeyLaughingBoy
And gasoline.

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Zikes
Yep, that does power plenty of tractors and tills already.

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keenerd
As someone who does farming (part time), I don't see these being practical.
For low value bulk crops (corn, wheat, soybeans) the robot is too expensive
and existing mechanization is too good. Even for high value stuff (grapes and
other fruit) it will be too expensive. Maybe inside a highly controlled
greenhouse this will be practical, but there are no food crops that are
economical to grow inside a greenhouse. (It is getting there as high-tunnel
becomes cheaper to install.)

As an aside, mechanical harvesters for grapes are hilarious. You still need
people to run them. One person's job is to find and remove possums from the
fruit bin before the critter is buried by a thousand pounds of fruit.

It is a distraction to talk about the gantry, XY or radial. Any gantry based
system is going to be a headache from the start because you've got those rails
cluttering up the space. Eventually you'll find something the robot cannot do
and then you'll be trying to figure out how to get your general purpose
tractor around without crushing the gantry.

The radial system is cute, except now your installation and operating costs
scale linearly with the amount of crops. With an XY system, one can plant more
and extend the rails and have the existing robots do more work. Not possible
with the radial system, unless you are going to physically pick up and move
the units between circles few times each day. If time is tight (plague of
locusts coming in tomorrow, need more robots to squish them) you can increase
the robot density by sliding more robots onto the XY gantry. Not possible with
radial.

Ultimately it will be about the vision processing and manipulators. And then
you might as well mount the vision/manipulator unit on a tractor and have a
robot-tractor drive up and down the fields, just like any other piece of
equipment. Vastly cheaper and more flexible than gantries.

Eventually we will get there, but it probably won't be until vision processing
and lidar gets a whole lot cheaper. We might be on the cusp though, based on
the computer vision advances in video gaming.

User roryaronson, I've done a lot with robotics and outdoor electronics too.
If you want I can give you a fairly lengthy piece of constructive critism
about your whitepaper. You've got a lot of good ideas in there, but just as
much misinformation.

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bglazer
I can't read the whitepaper due to work network restrictions (scribd? really?)
but superficially this seems more directed towards DIY-er gardener types
rather than industrial farming. That is to say, people who have no need for a
giant combine harvester.

For that purpose it seems to have the capability to automate some tedious jobs
quite nicely. I would pay for a machine that grows vegetables in my backyard
with little to no input from me.

That said, the possum remover must be the most hilariously bad job in farming.

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keenerd
They've probably fixed the possum thing by now :-)

Your comment makes me wonder what a good pricepoint would be for such a
system. How much money and how much space would you be willing to give up, for
example.

Less hypothetically, why the fixation on machines? We've got all sorts of
crazy services these days. How much would you be willing to pay for a
gardening service that maintains your garden for you and occasionally leaves a
crate of produce at your backdoor? It would be like a lawn service, but
without all the terrible effects on the local ecology.

