Looks great for a prototype. Has any modeling, simulation, or analysis been done of its off-road performance, i.e. mobility, GO/NOGO, motive efficiency, maneuverability on deformable terrain? This is critical for agricultural applications.<p>Has any stress analysis been done on the frame? Looks to me like it could use a couple more triangles to reinforce those rectangles.<p>Have you designed a skid-steering controller for it? Off-road skid steering can be quite variable obviously depending on terrain properties.
Rosys (a middleware layer <a href="https://github.com/zauberzeug/rosys" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zauberzeug/rosys</a>) has rosys.driving.Odometer and rosys.driving.Steerer it's essentially a differential drive kinematic model.<p>Hoping RTK dual-F9P moving-base setup (M4 in the roadmap) largely sidesteps the worst of this — NAV-RELPOSNED gives us a real heading vector independent of wheel odometry, and the robot_localisation EKF can weight RTK heavily and odometry lightly when GNSS quality is good.
The current simulation is underdeveloped but can be found here <a href="https://github.com/samuk/caatingarobotics/tree/jazzy/src/agro_robot_sim" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/samuk/caatingarobotics/tree/jazzy/src/agr...</a><p>The frame will almost certainly need more triangles
Australia's been working with various types of robotics in agriculture since 1980 at least, these days, for open field work there are several families of solution in developmental progress.<p>One leading contender is SwarmFarm Robotics, based out of Queensland.<p>* <a href="https://advance.qld.gov.au/innovation-in-queensland/innovation-stories/agtech-pioneer-swarmfarm-robotics-transforms-farming-with-autonomous-solutions" rel="nofollow">https://advance.qld.gov.au/innovation-in-queensland/innovati...</a><p>* <a href="https://www.swarmfarm.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.swarmfarm.com/</a><p>For interest, here's a recent opinion / demonstration from an unassociated Australian farmer considering a purchase.<p>The farm is Tom’s Brook, a grain farm located in Esperance in Western Australia. It’s a family operated business growing a mixture of Wheat, Barley and Canola on 4500 hectares (11 200 Acres). Sizewise is pretty much bang on the average W.Australian grain acerage.<p><i>Seeing a Swarm Bot in Action</i> (20 min) - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM</a><p>The unit pair in action here, autonomous tractor pulling intelligent boom spray, has had 10,000 acres of operation prior to this customer demonstration.<p>Unloaded weight ~ 3.5 metric tonne, loaded approx 5 tonne.<p>Runs at about 13 hectares per hour, max speed 10 km/hour.<p>Advantages of "intelligence" during operation are reduced spray usage (basic green on dirt detection, and green shape on mixed green patterns) and weather patience (happy to sit idle until wind and humidity are optimal)<p>70 odd Comments include feedback from other farmers already using such agribots, eg:<p><pre><code> Just rolled over 12,000 hrs on our swarmbot. 4 years, 3000hr a year, doesn't get into the shed much.</code></pre>
> The hardware is built around a stackable 10×10cm compute module with two ARM Cortex-A55 SBCs — one for ROS 2 navigation/EKF localisation, one dedicated to vision/YOLO inference — connected via a single ethernet cable.<p>I will preface this by saying that I have nothing against ARM per se, that my employer/team supported a good chunk of the work for making ROS 2 actually work on arm64, and that there is some good hardware out there.<p>I really don't understand why startups and research projects keep using weird ARM SBCs for their robots. The best of these SBCs is still <i>vastly</i> shittier in terms of software support and stability than any random Chinese Intel ADL-N box. The only reasons to use (weird) ARM SBCs in robots are that either (1) you are using a Jetson for Jetson things (i.e. Nvidia libraries), or (2) you have a product which requires serious cost optimization to be produced at a large scale. Otherwise you are just committing yourselves and your users/customers to a future of terrible-to-nonexistent support and adding significantly to the amount of work you need to bring up the new system and port existing tools to it.
If you can send me an open hardware Intel, or Jetson I'd happily use it.<p>Part of the point of this for me is to see what's possible with open hardware (down to chip level at least)
There are a variety of x86 products with Coreboot support, if what you are looking for is firmware openness. If what you are looking for is PCB design openness, the options are much fewer, but at that point you are probably optimizing for an overly niche objective.<p>> Part of the point of this for me is to see what's possible with open hardware (down to chip level at least)<p>I appreciate the idea, but this is essentially saying "this project will prioritize a specific choice of one (core) piece of hardware to the detriment of everything else, users included". Approximately none of your potential users are going to benefit from the "openness" of the SBC versus that of a more broadly-supported platform (I say "openness" because the reality of SBCs is that actually finding a usefully performant one that is completely blob-free is almost impossible). Open hardware means very little if it isn't running an upstream kernel and userland.
Framework? Maybe?
Framweork have done the best they can within the confines of Intel licensing, still a long way from being able to fabricate it though<p><a href="https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tree/main/Mainboard" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tre...</a><p>In a few years we'll all be using more open RISCV stuff of course.
> The only reasons to use ARM SBCs in robots are...<p>Obviously, anyone can have there own opinion on this.
I work in robotics, we are quite happy with our A53 and M4. Though, we use a SOM, not a SBC, if you feel like splitting hairs.
You probably aren't using some weird SOM, though. There is a bit of an unstated exception of "unless said SBC/SOM has specific hardware that is necessary/particularly valuable for your product/project". For example, if you need GMSL you are probably not going to be picking Intel, even though ADL-N and the bigger processors support MIPI, simply because no one else does and the documentation/support for it is basically nonexistent. Designs with closely-coupled A/M/R cores, or CPU/MCU/FPGA hybrids like Zynq would be others.<p>But generally projects which are choosing some random SBC aren't using any of these features, and are just suffering the pain/imposing it on their users for no good reason.
again, just an oppinion, but it feels really weird to hear you find "exception after exception", when the net result that you've ruled out more real world robotics projects on ARM than likely exist on x86 that you're suggesting should be the "norm".<p>you've ruled out the entire NXP ecosystem, the entire Nvidia Jetson ecosystem, the entire AMD/FPGA/Zynq ecosystem, even perfectly good options like beagle-board .... who else?<p>incidentally, you've also ruled out this project - as they are using an M7 microcontroller to meet their hard-real-time timing constraints...
What's your payload?
Where are the seeds?
How are they deposited?<p>Recommend going to a farm right now to see how this works in production. For the most part, you can autonomously sow using GPS. But the farmer just rides along.
Payload is whatever you (or your startup) want it to be.<p>For me personally mechanical between row weeding is step one, then laser in-row weeding.<p>1. These on some linear actuators: <a href="https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-cultivator-46007" rel="nofollow">https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-...</a> (they work surprisingly well)<p>2. Beyond that for in-row weeding a engraving laser on a Delta: <a href="https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/master/hardware#readme" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/m...</a><p>Or if I'm feeling rich by then this third party weeder looks pretty good <a href="https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER</a><p>3. For Seeding my salad crop
<a href="https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang" rel="nofollow">https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang</a><p>4. Harvesting my salad crop
<a href="https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester" rel="nofollow">https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester</a><p>I live on a farm, I have sold salad commercially, these are largely tools I already use and own, just moved about by motors rather than muscles.<p>This is a smaller scale thing than arable. We're talking a step up from manual horticulture (which is actually what still feeds much of the world)
Very cool! shameless self promotion but check out greenwave-monitor[1] for the 'Diagnostics TUI'. I'll get it into the buildfarm soon.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/NVIDIA-ISAAC-ROS/greenwave_monitor" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/NVIDIA-ISAAC-ROS/greenwave_monitor</a>
From a video somewhere in the page: "The aim is to make food production more sustainable and efficient" yet requires a web app. I'd hope that you can run the server side on a local machine and not require cloud connectivity.
I highly encourage you to go visit farms sooner rather than later, especially during the rainy seasons and winter when farmers are really at work preparing for the next season. The kind of conditions robots need to deal with in that environment is no joke.<p>I also notice you're using the BNO055 -- if you need an C++ I2C ROS driver for it I wrote one (<a href="https://github.com/dheera/ros-imu-bno055" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dheera/ros-imu-bno055</a>). I think the one in the ROS apt-get repository is written in Python but they claimed the package name before I did
Good advice on farms. I do live on a farm, so somewhat familiar with mud! Many of the worst problems are caused by moving 20ton tractors around IMHO, one of the problems small scale ag robotics may help with.<p>Will check out your Bno055 currently using the upstream one in Lizard<p><a href="https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/BNO055ESP32.h" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/...</a>
<a href="https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/BNO055ESP32.cpp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/...</a><p>Any review of that welcome too of course.
outside of sowing would you consider some open source drones like the new DJI with agriculture payload attached to it.<p>or some automated green house with open source designs.<p>love the name sowbot.
I did recently automate a greenhouse (heating, Hydroponics, fans, lights) it was just R&D rather than commercial so just used home assistant for it.<p>I did sketch out a slightly more 'professionalised' version, but haven't built it yet <a href="https://github.com/samuk/IoT-Greenhouse-Temperature-and-Irrigation-Controller-Node-Red" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/samuk/IoT-Greenhouse-Temperature-and-Irri...</a><p>I'd be pleasantly surprised if DJI had done anything open source, Ardupilot is pretty capable of course. I really want to automate the time consuming labour parts of horticulture, for me that's mostly weeding and to a lesser extent harvesting.
Great name, if nothing else!
Thanks, bit conflicted about it TBH, it's primarily/initially a weeding robot, although I do dream of expanding it to do harvesting, and yes potentially sowing too down the line.<p>Strapping something like the Jang P6 to it is probably feasible <a href="https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang" rel="nofollow">https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang</a><p>For the harvester it would be a bolt on for <a href="https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester" rel="nofollow">https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester</a> or maybe <a href="https://reagtools.co.uk/products/babyleaf-harvester-80cm" rel="nofollow">https://reagtools.co.uk/products/babyleaf-harvester-80cm</a> (I grow green salads)
A joke that's whooshing over my head?
This is the future, good luck to you
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