Open Source Farming Robot

It sill looks like the software is written by people who don't know how to care for plants. You don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video; you'll just end up with fungus infestation. You water the soil and nourish the microorganisms that facilitate nutrient absorption in roots. But, I don't see any reason the technology can't be adapted to do the right thing.

This is a Juicero of farming. The whole setup is easily replaced with a raised garden bed and a drip hose. Hearing about this a few years back, I was hoping it would at least do some weed control, but no.

Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible product. Who is the customer? If you like gardening, why would you pay thousands of dollars so that you don't need to do it? If you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be interested in having a robot do it for you.

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.

We could do with a lot less grass lawns and a lot more gardens. Even just growing flowers adds tremendously to the local ecosystem of insects, while adding beauty to your life. If this gets more people thinking about gardening, I'm all for it!

It's written in Elixir.

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.

This worries me from a positioning standpoint. I imagine a large amount of people with a garden bed, even a large one, garden because they like it, this would get in the way of that. The device doesn’t appear like it would scale well to anything large enough, and even then it would compete with much more sophisticated solutions that do this.

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.

This looks fun but not really useful.

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.

How many Farmbots would I need to feed 2 adults and 2 children year round? What challenges might I run into?

Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters

I've always wondered why this robot uses a gantry system.

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

Previous thread from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101

A lot of advances since then.

The idea of introducing robotics to farming is very attractive. It doesn't seem like this is a scalable solution for farming, but a sufficient one for gardening.

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.

How many harvests would it take to offset the emissions that go into producing a kit? My guess is that this uses more steel per sapling than almost any other method of tending to a vegetable

Would be interested to hear the experiences of someone who has used this.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned hydroponics. For $2800 you can build a very nice, large, and mostly automated hydroponics setup. It would have higher yields, no weeding, minimal pests if indoors, better nutrient control, a smaller footprint, more reliability, and less complexity.

Seems like a cool project, but not something I would pay thousands of dollars for as a hobbyist gardener. By the looks of it, might work for smaller plants, but not much use in growing larger varieties of tomato or cucumber for example.

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.

Make sure to check out Telegarden by Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana, from 1995-2004: https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars/

Would be interesting if they could get it to work in a circular pattern with multiple layers, where one FarmBot traverses each ring of the garden's "onion".

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.

[0] https://farm.bot/pages/yield

Everyone should absolutely do a small garden in their yard instead of grass or other wasteful landscaping.

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.

How many actual farmers are involved with this project, or were at least consulted?

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

It is curious to market a device as an improvement in self-sufficiency and design it to require an internet-connected centralized webapp.

Cool project, but $2800 for the basic kit is a lot to stomach given how many things can go wrong with robotics.

ROI shouldn't be calculated based on the costs of transportation, because no one goes to the store to buy just vegetables (and not everyone drives to the store, it's a purely suburban american thing). Not to mention 'CO2 costs' that you don't pay at all

A lot of people are criticizing this product. Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? Very curious! Also any community recommendations would be great.

Terrible design.

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.

I'd like to see a farming robot using the new SAM model from meta.

this is very wastefull and stupid, you can buy a auto prinkler with a timer for 100 euros, and seeding can be done by hand in the same time the bot does it.

I can't help but feel like this is a satirical send up of "tech bros solve farming," except it's not satire.

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?

The promo video - Industrial Farming Bad, Take Back Control, epic movie trailer soundtrack - is a real hoot, given the product it's selling.

I don't want to be accused of pedantry...but isn't this a gardening robot? I don't see how it scales to fields.

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.

If it was just a automated irrigation system and a camera with some detection for seeing if the plants look oka and can send a ping if a human needs to intervene. I remember hearing about this year's ago, and find it really cool, but it probably does to little, or is to expensive to be able to justify.

I think it's like, "I want to help in an industry I don't know anything about". This is not scalable. I understand that this person would like to help, but this is not the help that Farmers and needed.

I wonder if he asked farmers about their problems before creating this project.

Isn’t your headline deceptive? Open source farming bot and the next CTA is order now for $2700?

The main criticism against this seems to be it doesn't kill weeds. But it's an open system, with standardised, autonomously selectable attachments. Can someone come up with an attachment or two for it that could control weeds?

My garden bed has a slug problem. How can FarmBot help me with this? Is there a tool, like a grabber, that automatically catches intruders and carries them away?

I would love to contribute to something like this for cattle ranching. Track your herd with a mapping app, analyze the cows' vital signs, estimate how much land you need for grazing, etc.

More like gardenbot

A single bed isn't exactly an ungodly amount of effort to do by hand.

Think there is more potential industrial scale. i.e. run the arm over half a mile rather than a couple of feet

The amount of work required in getting this up and running and maintaining it could never pay for itself. The capital cost alone would take decades to pay back of ever.

These guys are charging €3000 for a kit that cost less than €400 if you order each item individually. They’re ripping off the customers.

This is very cool and I immediately wanted one. Hobby gardening is not exactly cost effective but I can think of cheaper ways to outsource growing vegetables...

Exactly what functions does it perform? Watering? Weeding? Can it remove slugs, caterpillars, etc?

Seems a bit like Vertical Farming, innovative but way to expensive tech. Anyway good luck!

Nice, I will have enough tomatoes for a whole week before they rot away.

Very cool. Do you have a way to see the farm live (via video streaming) in the app or the web?

Looks like a thing that takes away the pleasure from gardening/small scale farming.

Having watched Clarkson's Farm, I can't help but feel that farming is extremely antiquated. The sensitivity to unexpected weather and the low profit margins despite the high investments of time and money seem terrible. I can't see us as an advanced species doing this in 100 years, except for specialty experiences.

Is there an open source robot repository somewhere a-la github?

you can buy a soaker hose with a timer its like twenty bucks

Does it kill weeds? Is watering the only thing it does?

Lol @ most of you who think this is real. It's a troll post w Sora or something. Turn your fucking brain on. By the time you fuck around with that, you could have done the garden by hand 20 times.

My brother told me about this, years ago.

It’s a very cool project.

Looking at the pricing and the area the robot covers, isn't it too expensive?

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?

For some values of "open source": the datasets used for information about the plants and such are unavailable as of the last time I checked.

My retirement project is going to be this but at larger scale.

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?

Farmer and roboticist here.

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.

it is so so easy to grow that much of a garden, this is a complete waste

I used to love things like this, now I realise that actually caring for living things is quite nice and life affirming, and spending yet more time behind a screen really is not. 40 hours+ per week obligate online-time plus recreation is not a great way to live life. Our working lives are too long and our hours per week are too many. The sooner we learn to touch grass regularly, the better. Robots are evidently not the way to do this.

nah, part of the fun of gardening is interacting with plants

Snippets from my partners reactions:

"Aimed at prosumers...uh...more nerdsumers"

"Oh I just saw the price, $4000 to avoid an hours work"

This project sucks ass - I know some research groups (non-engineering, they were more ag programs) who purchased it from them for a few thousand dollars and pretty much shelved it after a few months - unreliable hardware, buggy software, minimal support - all in all it would probably have been much more easier if we hired a bunch of engineering undergrads to build something like this from scratch.

But why?