by pedrodelfino on 8/3/24, 11:37 PM with 356 comments
by getpost on 8/4/24, 3:18 AM
by torlok on 8/4/24, 8:30 AM
by constantcrying on 8/4/24, 9:01 AM
I just can't imagine who would buy this. Gardening can be done very cheap and I believe that most people do it because they like spending time outside, working with their hands, being involved with the food they eat and saving a bit of money. Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away with that?
On an industrial scale this thing is of course totally useless.
by j_m_b on 8/4/24, 1:21 PM
by __MatrixMan__ on 8/4/24, 1:52 AM
Maybe it's just a grass-is-greener thing but the more Kubernetes I have to stomach, the more interested I become in BEAM languages like Elixir.
Not like they're alternatives exactly, but I get the feeling that the BEAM way is to solve the ops problems in a way resembles how you solved your dev problems. More holistic, less ad hoc.
by antoniojtorres on 8/4/24, 6:39 AM
I feel like it’s actual market may end up being pretty narrow, not that it isn’t it a cool idea, it is, but it just gave me that gut reaction that it falls squarely in the uncanny valley between industrial users and hobbyists.
by apexalpha on 8/4/24, 12:31 PM
My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need.
Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
by myprotegeai on 8/4/24, 2:17 AM
Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters
by ragebol on 8/4/24, 7:42 AM
Would be less intrusive and thus easier to work alongside a human if it was a polar system, with a single pole in the middle/corner, like a tower crane.
Simpler mechanically as well I suppose
by pedrodelfino on 8/3/24, 11:37 PM
A lot of advances since then.
by abdullahkhalids on 8/4/24, 4:26 AM
They started this project a decade ago. But robotics has advanced quite a bit in that time. Surely, today it is much more viable to have four wheeled robots watering, weeding etc at the same precision this product can. Then why build a gantry.
by willguest on 8/4/24, 10:24 AM
by f0e4c2f7 on 8/4/24, 2:34 AM
by driverdan on 8/4/24, 2:52 PM
by weweweoo on 8/4/24, 8:49 AM
Really the only thing I would trust and want to automate is watering when I'm away, and that can be done much cheaper. The most burdensome part right now in my greenhouse is actually keeping the large plants in check, prevent them from growing too much by taking away right leaves/branches. The robot probably wouldn't do too much to help with that. Weeds are a problem outside, but that's way too large of an area to cover with this kind of robots.
by gohai on 8/4/24, 6:27 AM
by owenpalmer on 8/4/24, 4:40 AM
For an optimized garden to feed a family, you need 549 square meters[0], which is a circle with a diameter of 26.4 meters (86.7 ft). That's all the vegetables for your entire family, mostly automated.
That's a future I would love to see, even though it's way less efficient than industrial farming.
by silexia on 8/7/24, 10:27 PM
As a farmer, this looks like it would be massively expensive per acre and massively wasteful of environmental resources. I currently farm 5,000 acres including 400 irrigated acres for $300,000 per year. I grow enough food to feed thousands of people a year.
You would need 200 of these systems to farm one acre. I could not find a list price on the website, but based on my knowledge of CNC machine pricing, each machine probably costs in the neighborhood of $10,000. So this machine would cost $2,000,000 per acre to farm. Insanity.
Government bureaucrats want you to starve to death, so I am sure money will go to this and be taken from ordinary farmers.
The system also appears to be an environmental disaster... Enormous amounts of heavily machined aluminum, stainless steel, and plastic to do tiny bits of work already done far more efficiently in other ways.
by CapstanRoller on 8/4/24, 10:18 AM
This thing looks like an out-of-touch nerd hobby project, not a real tool one would use in the real world of farming.
The "Commercial Production" link goes to a page mostly consisting of... art projects. https://farm.bot/pages/research
by simpaticoder on 8/4/24, 8:15 PM
by 0cf8612b2e1e on 8/4/24, 2:34 AM
by klntsky on 8/4/24, 12:06 PM
by cl42 on 8/4/24, 5:09 PM
by fennecfoxy on 8/5/24, 9:54 AM
Modular hydroponic pods have always been a better idea and if someone handed me 100 million I'd use it to develop standardised farming skyscrapers/towers to hydroponically grow food in towns/local communities with minimal water, electricity usage and human intervention.
It's so crazy that we have the tech to do this sort of thing now, but don't. We could do so much if things weren't so profit focussed and the wealthy weren't able to skim most of it off to dump into tax havens.
by aussieguy1234 on 8/4/24, 6:24 AM
by theo1996 on 8/4/24, 1:33 PM
by taylorfinley on 8/4/24, 3:06 AM
I am a software engineer, I also runs a small family farm. I have 3d printers and laser cutters and lots of aluminum extrusion and raspberry pis... but I keep those things indoors, away from the dirt, sun, and rain. I can't imagine a real farmer using a contraption like this. Tools have to be reliable to last. I have to replace my solid steel shovels every few years because they wear out, how is this supposed to work?
by nmeofthestate on 8/4/24, 12:08 PM
by jimnotgym on 8/4/24, 11:00 AM
I don't really see what problem it solves. Growing in a raised bed with drip irrigation looks a lot less hassle than setting up a giant cnc watering machine. If you mulch once a year you don't need to add nutrients to a no dog bed at all.
by gunalx on 8/4/24, 11:00 AM
by Brosper on 8/4/24, 10:19 AM
I wonder if he asked farmers about their problems before creating this project.
by indus on 8/4/24, 2:51 PM
by robxorb on 8/4/24, 8:37 PM
by tmaier on 8/6/24, 8:13 PM
by d_burfoot on 8/4/24, 1:46 PM
by wmoxam on 8/4/24, 2:06 AM
by Havoc on 8/4/24, 2:21 PM
Think there is more potential industrial scale. i.e. run the arm over half a mile rather than a couple of feet
by rammer on 8/4/24, 9:50 AM
by craftoman on 8/6/24, 6:19 AM
by matthewiiiv on 8/4/24, 8:57 AM
by avodonosov on 8/4/24, 10:35 PM
by ensocode on 8/5/24, 7:41 AM
by greenhearth on 8/6/24, 3:53 PM
by chfritz on 8/4/24, 4:04 AM
by madmask on 8/4/24, 12:20 PM
by mherrmann on 8/4/24, 8:16 AM
by fareesh on 8/4/24, 6:16 AM
by _Marak_ on 8/4/24, 6:15 AM
by cactusplant7374 on 8/4/24, 12:19 PM
by BigParm on 8/4/24, 1:36 PM
by ChrisMarshallNY on 8/4/24, 1:38 AM
It’s a very cool project.
by wiradikusuma on 8/4/24, 4:35 AM
I mean, with that land size, it can be easily done by a human in a few minutes? And I'm guessing most people who grow crops at that size do it for a hobby, which means they don't mind doing the work?
by donw on 8/4/24, 2:01 AM
by hengheng on 8/4/24, 2:07 PM
Remove the tires from two old bicycles to run them on rails, build a gantry between them mounted to seatposts and handlebars. Probably drive it with chains on winches for robustness.
Use movable wall elements so that the pick and place machine can set up both shade and increased illumination. Maybe have portable rain protection too. Maybe deploy close-up UV and IR lamps.
I'd like to know the max size that a single gantry can serve, see how high its utilization can be.
My guess is that it all can pay off once it's big enough. I just don't know where that point is. 100ft long? 200ft? 300? And 20ft wide?
by GlenTheMachine on 8/4/24, 2:11 PM
There is a lot of discussion in a lot of threads about the design of the robot to water "from the top" by spraying the leaves instead of watering directly on the roots, and whether that's a good or bad thing, and whether the designers of the robot thought about it.
Here's the problem with watering the leaves: yes, plants ultimately get their water from rain. But under normal conditions, the rain comes in sporadically in large quantities -- not every day -- and soaks into the soil, which is where the plants actually pick it up. Flood irrigation does largely the same thing. Spray irrigation doesn't attempt to water the soil that deeply, it tends to give the plants just what they need for the next 24-48 hours, and that encourages wilt and fungal infections.
Also, domesticated vegetable crops are far more susceptible to wilt and fungal infections than natives, and than grain crops, which are at the end of the day grasses. So you can in the same garden have perfectly healthy corn but all of your melons and squash have such bad fungal infections that the leaves are literally white. You can criticize the selection of vegetables for yield and not hardiness, but the fact is this is where we are with vegetable crops.
This is an interesting project, but IMHO it isn't practical, and there isn't any way to make it practical. The X-Y gantry design, for gardening, has a number of intractable problems, watering from the top being just one of them. Another is that the design doesn't scale. You can't make this thing handle a 25 by 100 foot grade bed, which is the size you'd need to even start making a serious dent in the nutritional needs of one person. It can't really weed, and there's no way to modify the design to make it weed effectively; you'd have to add degrees of freedom to the gantry so that it could reach down to soil level and grasp roots (or, alternatively, to very selectively apply an herbicide). Garden crops grow to dramatically different heights; micro greens will be a few inches about the soil, zucchini will be three feet high, tomatoes can be 4-5 feet, and corn depending on cultivar can be as much as 9 feet tall.
And finally, watering and weeding, if you know what you're doing are actually the easiest parts of the problem. Preparing the bed so you don't have to weed is a lot more work. To do that, you plant your crops and then apply large amounts of mulch. If you've never prepared beds, shoveled dirty barn straw for mulch or tried to wrangle weed barrier cloth on a hot, humid day, you haven't lived, my friend. That's the physically hard part. THe mentally hard part is diagnosing problems in your crops before they become problems. Noticing that those shiny weird insects flying around are squash vine borer. Looking at the underside of leaves and seeing squash beetle eggs or going around your tomatoes with a blacklight looking for cutworms.
If you want to apply robotics to gardens, you either need a low mobile base, or you need to carefully lay out rows with fixed spacing, and have a high mobile base that can clear the height of the crops, and can take a variety of attachments, e.g. tillers to handle weed control. Which means you need think about monocropping. Which starts to look like the mid 20th century basic garden tractor, the International Harvester Farmall Cub, just with maybe an electric power plant and an autonomy appliqué kit. THis makes sense because the mid 20th century was the last time people in North America practiced gardening as a survival mechanism, and the Farmall Cub was the result of 50 years of practical design by people who knew how to garden when it counted.
by kingkawn on 8/4/24, 12:55 PM
by hkt on 8/4/24, 9:42 AM
by greenie_beans on 8/4/24, 2:55 PM
by vertis on 8/4/24, 7:41 AM
"Aimed at prosumers...uh...more nerdsumers"
"Oh I just saw the price, $4000 to avoid an hours work"
by alsodumb on 8/4/24, 3:15 PM
by nickhodge on 8/4/24, 2:39 AM