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439 points david927 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.224s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
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chrisb ◴[] No.44428020[source]
https://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.

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worik ◴[] No.44428536[source]
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...

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1. chrisb ◴[] No.44431919[source]
Before we started building we considered many different designs, including legs. However, it introduces significant extra mechanical and control complexity, with more complex failure modes - e.g. one leg gets stuck in the mud; it also would be more expensive to build.

So we decided to stick with wheels, at least for this product iteration!