There are some interesting things being done with pivot spans. Hummingbird runs nozzles back and forth on rails suspended from each pivot span. But they’re difficult to keep running.

Ag is hard. It’s dusty. The weather can be brutal. Stuff gets left out year round. The turnover is high. Schedules are dynamic and unforgiving (when the weather turns, you have to adapt your whole operation). There’s not a lot of highly technical staff to maintain things; bailing wire and bandaids is a real thing. The tradition of “hacking things” to keep them working comes from farmers.

The more complicated your machinery, the more your MTBF product goes up. So complicated units don’t scale well.

If a single sprinkler on a pivot fails or misbehaves, there’s nearly 400 of them and there’s some overlap. If your “robot” stalls out with some grit or a power supply issue or a bricked update, or leaky hydraulics, you just lost 1/10 of your pivot. Pray it happens on an inner span, rather than an outer one.

I think you meant the MTBF goes down.

Meganeura is an insect too, so most civil drones are already smaller than biggest insects.

It’s interesting to note how the size of Meganeura is credited to environmental factors (oxygen ration in the air). Context is everything, as usual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meganeura