alt Hacker Newshttps://spring-agriculture.com/
Autonomous robotics for sustainable agriculture. Based in the south of the UK. Prototypes of an autonomous mechanical farm-scale weeding robot currently beginning real-world testing. Still a huge amount of work to do though.
Hardware and software developed fairly much from scratch, not using ROS (for not entirely crazy reasons...); everything written in Rust which I find well suited to this application area.
The robot is built using off-the-shelf components and 3d-printed custom parts, so build cost is surprisingly low, and iterations are fast (well, for hardware dev).
On robot compute is a couple of Raspberry Pi 5s.
Currently using the RPi AI Kit for image recognition, ie Hailo 8[L] accelerators.
Not currently using any advanced robotics VLA-type AI models, but soon looking to experiment with some of it, initially in simulation.
Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to talk :) Contact details in my HN profile, and on our website.
Replies
I invested in Small Robots Co (https://smallrobotco.com/) who were doing something similar. They had a good product, good brand, raised some funding, and were starting to get traction, with robots in trials on a number of farms, but at the end of the day they ran out of funding before they reached default-alive.
It's a tough space - convincing farmers to give it a go and running trials takes time and the UK isn't a very startup-friendly environment - investors are too often looking for a quick return.
This is such an important area - it's only going to become more critical to be able to grow more food whilst using less fertiliser and weed killer - so I wish you the very best of luck!
Very interesting
I have seen a few of these, but only one (about a decade ago) that used legs not wheels
Wouldn't it be better if the robot walked rather than rolled?
You may be able to illuminate this for me...
Very Cool!! I'm pretty new to the robotics world, why are you avoiding ROS?