Small robots may kill the tractor and make farming efficient

Re:Small robots may kill the tractor and make farming efficient by carapace on Monday November 12, 2018 @12:39PM (#18434089)

I'm building something similar but for litter collection.

In order to make the system mobile I'm making a sort of tiny tractor that relocates the bases of the support struts (I use a tripod.) You can have separate symbiotic fleets of static "heads" (tripod+wirebot) that are moved by mobile "rovers".

This lets you optimize the system a little better, since most of the time the head units will be working and largely stationary, so a small fleet of rovers could be enough to handle a large fleet of processors.

For ricefields I think you might sink stepping stones in a triangle "grid", maybe concrete cones about a meter long and 10cm at the base, inverted and stuck in the mud. The distance between them would be fixed by the span of the suspended robot.

You would also want "vascular" conduits to transport material to and from the working heads. These aren't necessarily physical tubes or conveyor belts, they could be made of simple cargo drones like streams of ants.

You could make bridge or rail units that fit between the stepping stones for temporary reconfigurable transport networks. (If your cargo drones are sure-footed and reliable these could be simple planks.)

Also, have you heard of Hangprinter? https://vitana.se/opr3d/tbear/ (I have no affiliation w/ it.) It's a "RepRap hanging from the ceiling"

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Re:Small robots may kill the tractor and make farming efficient by Iv on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @05:26AM (#18439980)

Interesting! Actually my dream would be to make a system deployable by a fleet of drones. Rovers are actually complex to move, especially in an uncontrolled environment with lots of plants.

I don't think any rice farmer would like to put concrete blocks in their fields unless every task is reliably automated: they depend on machines to prepare, plant and harvest the rice and a stone in the middle of a ricefield would make these steps harder.

I know that there are several projects using wirebots for 3d printing. It usually allows for a bigger printing volume than regular CNC-like designs, and I think they must be able to have a high precision too. I am wondering what is the limitation there.

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