Farming and gardening robots for home, educational, and commercial use. Premium Hardware · Worldwide Shipping · Drag and Drop Farm Designer · Step-by-Step Assembly Instructions · Own Your Food
FarmBot is an open source project aimed at making CNC farming accessible to as many people as possible.
this is sadly one of the big problems with farmbot, keeping the trackways clear in an actual use situation requires as much work as weeding. My hope is that ambulatory platforms (spider robots) which are able to nimbly move through a garden space while carrying the required tool heads will be able to use these methods to work in much larger areas and without so much visually disagreeable infrastructure.
Do you know if anybody is working on a spider / walking bot?
I was looking at the farmbot and thinking a version with 20" bicycle wheels would be better. Then you could have a long path where it just moves back and forth. And maybe use a robot arm based on rotating arms instead of linear actuators. And then build the whole thing so it fits neatly under a big glass solar panel. Maybe a tool changer so it can pick up a watering can. The mechanical side should be relatively easy to build, the problem still seems to be the AI vision software.
With food prices rising it might be worth it if you can increase the area it can patrol.
Having been around CNCs, robots, and gardens I tend to agree. If you can’t handle weeding in a human-sized garden, don’t garden. Especially when you mulch and plant a good mix to cover ground and different plant heights there aren’t really any weeds to begin with.
There are people who cannot do even that little bit of weeding.
Then in all likelihood they can’t maintain such a robot either.
this is sadly one of the big problems with farmbot, keeping the trackways clear in an actual use situation requires as much work as weeding. My hope is that ambulatory platforms (spider robots) which are able to nimbly move through a garden space while carrying the required tool heads will be able to use these methods to work in much larger areas and without so much visually disagreeable infrastructure.
🕷️💚
Do you know if anybody is working on a spider / walking bot?
I was looking at the farmbot and thinking a version with 20" bicycle wheels would be better. Then you could have a long path where it just moves back and forth. And maybe use a robot arm based on rotating arms instead of linear actuators. And then build the whole thing so it fits neatly under a big glass solar panel. Maybe a tool changer so it can pick up a watering can. The mechanical side should be relatively easy to build, the problem still seems to be the AI vision software.
With food prices rising it might be worth it if you can increase the area it can patrol.
Having been around CNCs, robots, and gardens I tend to agree. If you can’t handle weeding in a human-sized garden, don’t garden. Especially when you mulch and plant a good mix to cover ground and different plant heights there aren’t really any weeds to begin with.