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Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

439 points david927 | 2 comments | 29 Jun 25 20:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.536s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
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chrisb ◴[30 Jun 25 21:22 UTC] 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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pistachiosPower ◴[01 Jul 25 08:07 UTC] No.44431698[source]▶
Very Cool!! I'm pretty new to the robotics world, why are you avoiding ROS?
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1. chrisb ◴[01 Jul 25 08:58 UTC] No.44431966[source]▶
My knowledge of ROS is a couple of years out of date, but primarily that reproducible testing and simulation, with precise time/clock management, which is essential for a reliable product, was very difficult in ROS.

I also felt the ROS build system more convoluted than necessary; and seemed rather brittle - it was too easy to break it with OS or other updates.

We found that many off-the-shelf ROS nodes didn't do quite what we wanted, and ended up spending much more time than expected rewriting code that we expected we wouldn't need to. It is quicker, and we end up with less & more maintainable code, by writing it ourselves.

I expect this could have been resolved, but when testing ROS we also ended up using more compute resources on-robot than we expected.

Using our own system allows us to build exactly what we require, which has become more important as our system gets larger and more complex; and means integrations into other systems (including testing) are easier.

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2. pistachiosPower ◴[01 Jul 25 09:10 UTC] No.44432026[source]▶
You are already the second case in two weeks that have abandoned ROS for industrial purpose(and not university), preferring to build something of their own. I agree that the build system is more complicated than it should be,but I was unaware of the problems related to the resources used by the nodes.

Your comment gave me a lot to think about, thank you.