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FarmBot: an Open Source Automated Farming Machine
New submitter ErnieKey writes: Farming has been stuck in a bit of a rut, when compared to other industries. Businesses across the globe have been innovating for decades, while farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago. The FarmBot Foundation is creating a machine, similar to that of a CNC mill and/or 3D printer, which is capable of being run by sophisticated software and equipped with any tools you can imagine, including seed injectors, plows, burners, robotic arms (for harvesting), cutters, shredders, tillers, discers, watering nozzles, sensors and more. The goal? To increase food production by automating as much of it as possible.
Make a GardenBot that works, and you'll become a trillionaire.
Businesses across the globe have been innovating for decades, while farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago.
That's not true at all. Maybe in some hobby farms, but at a large scale (which is where most food actually comes from), farming in 2014 is nothing like farming in 1914. Modern agribusiness is highly automated, which is why the proportion of the U.S. population engaged in farm work has declined from about 30% to about 2%, while food production has increased.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
> Farming has been stuck in a bit of a rut, ... farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago.
Apparently this author's understanding of agriculture is based on cartoons. Self-driving cars are a brand new thing; largely self-driving agricultural equipment is not so new. Have a look at the cockpit of a modern John Deere in working trim. Better yet, come on down to Tecas A&M (agriculture and mechanical) and we'll show you some things. It's no coincidence that A&M is a leader in drone research too.
So this bot is not for WoW or Eve online?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Get bad results.
Agriculture has been advancing as fast as any other technology field.
Here are some recent developments: http://www.popularmechanics.co...
and GPS is becoming important to farm competitiveness: https://www.bae.ncsu.edu/topic...
None of this depending on massive fixed installations, so it can be used cost effectively over thousands of acres of fields.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
Because I wasn't aware that power tractors, modern pesticides, and engineered crops had been around for "centuries." And it will be interesting to see if an all-in-one robot will really do better than each of those functions on separate towed carriages that a generic tractor pulls. My guess is "no."
"while farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago"
That's such horse shit (excuse the abstract pun), I nearly fell off my chair.
The mechanisation of farming, in the last 200 years, is probably one of the most profound changes humanity has witnessed in a thousand years!
In the last 60 or 70 years, development in the agricultural sector has been so rapid, it's now possible for a single person to do the job of 20, 30, 40 people and above, depending on the size of the farm.
Then we get down to seed, GM crops, fertilizers, sensors, irrigation.
Anyone who can't see how much farming has changed and innovated over the centuries is... well, lets just politely say, misinformed in the extreme.
What do they teach kids in school these days?
Too bad it's so inaccurate. My wife works for John Deere. Their combines now have GPS in them, and will do crop analysis while harvesting. I tihnk the only thing keeping them from being fully automated is the farmers themselves.
" while farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago. "
What? we have made better plows, we have automated harvesters, we can genetically engineer plants to make the better, starter and healthier.
.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Someone hasn't been on a farm in a while. Farming is seriously high tech, with computer vision and robots and machines the size most city dweller won't see their whole life. You may think having a latest gen smart phone and sitting in front of a computer all day makes you high tech, but farmers have you beat.
Ah, so now we can fully realize the dream of Gene Simmons reprogramming robots to kill. I seem to remember a farming robot was part of the intro. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
To make it easy, here's a picture of the "centuries old" technology in a 2010 model John Deere 1910E.
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/...
The fields I drive by on my way to work put the lie to the author's premise. A week ago, I saw a road-scrapper type device running around a field that had a spinning laser positioned more or less in the center of the field. The laser provided a level reference that the scrapper responded to moment by moment by lifting or lowering the blade. The machines are designed to build a field with a precise gradient so the farmer can minimize the amount of water needed to irrigate the field as well as to uniformly irrigate the crop. The water may be free but lifting it from the aquifer isn't.
Further down the road, there was a device that was building perfect raised beds covered in plastic. Strawberries need to be grown in well drained soil and the raised beds provide that. The plastic is used to keep a fumigant on the bed until it decays instead of leaking into the atmosphere prior to seeding. Once the soil is fumigated, it's planted by an automated planter that leaves the plastic in place to reduce evaporation - again to save water.
The next field over was being harvested by a machine that requires two people to operate it. Ten years ago, there'd be a crew of 30 doing the same task.
The industrial revolution upended farming from what it was centuries ago and that process hasn't stopped since. The net result is fewer people are needed to grow more food at a lower cost. Downside is calories have become so cheap that most of us are overfed.
Everything that can be automated has been automated. Just look at a modern combine harvester and marvel.
Delicate crops are more difficult to automate not because we lack the technology to built a machine to do it, but because that machine is not cost-efficient to build compared to slave labor.
We didn't ship in another five million Mexicans for nothing, kids.
They plan to take this technology to an entirely new level by creating a 3D Printer that is capable of, you guessed it, farming.
So it's not a printer in any sense of the word. Great start for that article. The rest really goes downhill from there. Shouldn't it have been published on the 1st of April?
They have doohickey's out now that take advantage of satellite imaging to tell the farmers where there is a problem in the fields, where it may need more or less fertilizer or water, how to plant better, when crops need to be rotated. There is also equipment with camera's on them that adjust the fertilizer or pesticides coming out of each nozzle on the fly. That way what is being put on the crop is customized for what that section of field needs. As been said above, combines and tractors where the operator just monitors what is going on, because between the GPS and the onboard computers everything is taken care of. If you want to improve farming, figure out how to drive a machine thru a field picking ripe tomatoes without bruising it, or knocking any other tomatoes to the ground. Or how to harvest fruit, only the ripe fruit, out of a tree or off a vine. Or how to pick broccoli, cabbage, lettuce and other foods like that without all the stoop labor.
That's not a rut, it's a furrow.
I think you've put your finger on an underserved market - clandestine growbots that can be sent out to tend your crop in national forests while maintaining plausible denialblitiy.
Anti-aircraft-drone drones. Drive-by killbots for defending your territory. And pusherbots. And if you expand into related industries, pimpbots.
Like Syndicate LARP. With robots.
You know, for the kids.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
First there was SimFarm (1993). Then Harvest Moon (1996). Then Farm Town (2009). Then whatever Zynga called its own copy.
PC LOAD FERTILIZER.
But what does the PC stand for there? Poop Cassette?
Like tractors and fertilizer.
I've been looking for ways to reduce my time actively playing Farmville for a while now.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
>The goal? To increase food production by automating as much of it as possible.
They believe that automation is the key to increasing food production? Are they serious? The key to increasing food production is to either get more acreage in production, or to increase the amount of food produced per acre. Most types of farming (like corn & wheat) don't take huge amounts of labor. Even if they could automate something like picking vegetables that still wouldn't make it so there's more food, just, maybe, cheaper food.
Like genetically engineers crops, GPS in tractors and automated grain processing facilities?
I just had a flashback to 'Spaced Invaders'
Don't be put off by the clueless submitter. This is actually a really cool project that goes way beyond existing types of automation. This quote, for example, gives a sense of the kinds of things they're trying to enable:
The tremendous potential that FarmBot creates, allows for many new methods of farming, including the ability to create “polycrops” which mix and match different crops, unlike methods seen on typical farms.... Traditionally this has been impossible, as each different plant species requires different care techniques. For example, some crops require more water than others, while some crops require water at their stalk, rather than at their base. Some plants require more or different types of fertilizers than others. FarmBot’s software makes this process extremely simple, as each plant can virtually be programmed for their individual needs.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
There is no "FarmBot". There is only a Kickstarter project to start a wiki to create a social network for talking about farming-related subjects, parhaps including talking about a FarmBot.
Provide free farming automation equipment to all farmers within 200 miles of any border.
It seems like that would cut down so heavily on demand for labor, that not many people would find it worth trying to cross.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Farming today is nothing like farming was in the 1980's. I left the farm in 1983 ...
That's about the time my university got its first microcomputer lab. The lab was put together by the agriculture department. Mostly Apple //e. Apparently there was a lot of farm management and planning software in existence. And I'm not talking financial accounting. Thing like planning crop rotations, planting, harvesting, watering, minimizing fertilizer and pesticide use, etc.
I was a CS major but I helped them set up the lab so they let me use it.
"Farming has been stuck in a bit of a rut, when compared to other industries. Businesses across the globe have been innovating for decades, while farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago."
That was obviously written by a non-farmer. Farming is one of the leading places of innovation and technological advancement both at small and large scale farms. I take it from the writer's obvious ignorance that they live in a box in the city.
If ernieKey knew anything about modern agriculture he wouldn't have claimed such a lack of technological progress in agriculture. Crop production uses GPS controlled tractors and combines, animal production uses computer controlled monitoring and automation of environmental controls, electronic feeding systems that allow for group housing AND individualized nutrition plans, feed mills use real time NIR to evaluate feedstuffs so as to enable more accurate feed formulation, slaughter houses are wonders of automation where a carcass can be processed with a minimum of human interaction... I could go on indefinitely. As neat as his techno be, the tech already in widespread use in the industry is similarly impressive (and shipping TODAY).
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
I started on a project with a physicist (who was a farmer) to do automated farming robots which were unlike all the previous projects (affordable and open, no need for GPS either... plus we'd pick the ideal kind of plants initially. We had green houses figured out too.) Those other projects are usually jokes, just dressing for a fairly typical student project. We began the initial designing work preparing for grant writing and that whole process. Then after some thought we decided it was not a good idea to replace the already poor farmers of the world with automation. Perhaps this is why previous projects ended up as silly exercises?
We decided to not be part of the problem; plus there was likely going to be politics involved. Keep in mind, a cheap solution would be a threat for most the worlds farmers, who are not high tech like the ones in the 1st world nations. The 1st world nations are likely dependent on their huge subsidizes even with their technological labor savings; for those nations, keeping industrial agriculture is about national security and politics.
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This is not about producing more food, this is about reducing the production cost. After all, the same work could have been done by humans.
But I would appreciate other improvement from farming: Instead of producing more or cheaper, it would be nice to produce more sustainable: avoid erosion, limit chemical helpers, avoid GMO (which will just drive resistance against chemical helpers), manage water supply...
Though only finished and released around 1997: http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...
(Unrelated work and also two years of grad school to learn more about ecological modelling plus excessive ambition caused delays in getting it done...)
And MECC's "Lunar Greenhouse" from 1989 ran on the Apple II:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/...
This emulator did not work for me, but seemingly Lunar Greenhouse is online:
http://www.virtualapple.org/me...
http://www.virtualapple.org/J_...
But there are other text-based games like Hamurabi which goes all the way back to 1968 where you "plant" crops and harvest them. I played a variation of tha first around 1980 or so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
It can be played online:
http://www.hammurabigame.com/h...
I've long wanted to build a general purpose gardening (and maintenance) robot like the ones in "Silent Running". For some reason, there has been economic resistance to supporting general purpose agricultural robots. Cheap illegal labor in that sense harmed my career in robotics in the 1980s when I really, really wanted to make such things. :-(
That's one reason I've just done software, which is cheaper to do on your own than robotics. Or it was, now that robotics is getting so much cheaper for various reasons due to cheap powerful embedded computers and cheaper sensors and actuators and 3D printing and web-based design and manufacturing like via 100K garages and such.
http://www.100kgarages.com/
There were a couple times I spoke with academic roboticists about making general purpose agricultural robotics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both were interested in industry-fundable specific purpose robots, like for seeding transfer in greenhouses (Rutgers) or for autonomous wheat harvesting with big machines (CMU). Those were no doubt fairly practical ideas, and I may have been well served in a robotics career to have pursued such practical ideas in cooperation with those professors, but they were not the general purpose system I really wanted to work on like the Silent Running-type drones. Still, they might have been stepping stones to better systems -- but it is easy to be too ambitious and impatient when you are young.
Nowadays though, there seems to be a resurgence of interest in agricultural robotics, and I wonder if crackdowns on illegal agricultural labor may even be connected to it?
"Crackdown on illegal immigrants left crops rotting in Georgia fields, ag chief tells US lawmakers
http://blog.al.com/wire/2011/1...
Also, this is a problematical statement from the point of view of a robotics engineer: "A robust agricultural guest worker program, properly designed, will not displace American workers," Black said in remarks prepared for the hearing. "As my testimony shows, in Georgia, even with current high unemployment rates, it is difficult for farmers to fill their labor needs."
That guest worker program displaces robotics engineers... Otherwise there would be a much greater demand for general purpose agricultural robots.
Instead, I worked on virtual gardening software for growing virtual plants. My wife and I also made a simpler version of the garden simulator just for breeding virtual plants (mostly her work):
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
That said, there is little that is better for mental health for many people than
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Other styles of farming whether square foot gardening or indoor hydroponics can be much more productive per acre than big field farming with tractors, but they are *labor* and *knowledge* intensive. Robotics (or other automation) make greater yields per square foot much more achievable more cheaply. That also makes vertical farming in cities more feasible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.motherearthnews.com...
http://www.verticalfarm.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
See especially: ... energy efficiency for biointensive production of onions in our study was over 50 times higher than this value (51.5), and 83% of the total energy required is renewable energy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
"A 2010 study published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems showed that biointensive methods resulted in significantly increased production and a reduction of energy use when compared with conventional agriculture (Moore, S.R., 2010, Energy efficiency in smallâscale biointensive organic onion production in Pennsylvania, USA, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 25:3, pp. 181â188). This study states that "Current mechanized agriculture has an energy efficiency ratio of 0.9
The fact that many people have inefficient backyard gardens does not mean that people could not have very productive gardens if they knew more and had more time for them. Biosphere II was a good example of intensive food production in a small space.
See also books on "Survival Gardening".
http://theprepperproject.com/s...
The best one I've seen (by that name, by John Freeman) is not mentioned there though:
http://www.amazon.com/Survival...
Don't know about this new one by someone else:
http://www.amazon.com/Survival...
Granted, that is mostly about organic vegetables and beans. Grains may be a somewhat different issue, but they are already heavily automated in many ways. But as Dr. Fuhrman suggests, eating more fruits and vegetables is healthier than eating more grains (especially refined grains).
You should not discount that gardening in the sunshine can be good health-promoting exercise. It saves money indirectly by displacing other less healthy recreational activities like shopping for the next unneeded consumer item.
BTW, we can grind up rock to get good fertilizer for relatively cheap, especially if powered by excess renewable energy:
http://remineralize.org/
By this estimate by economist Julian Simon, there is plenty of opportunities for growing lots more food if we want to:
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
General purpose agricultural robotics makes intensive gardening so much more feasible to do on a small local scale... Still, highly-automated indoor agriculture powered by cheap energy is probably more the future of food production because it is so much more predictable.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Most of the top comments I'm seeing are pointing out the clearly false statement that farming hasn't changed much.
The more interesting thing to me here is the obvious potential for smaller groups of people with smaller amounts of land and money to run much more sophisticated food-growing operations than would otherwise be possible.
If you read the TFA, you might realize that the application of CNC-type tech to maintaining a complex mixed garden and maximizing its output is actually a pretty damn interesting and potentially very useful idea. Decentralizing more of our food production is absolutely essential to increasing our chances of long term survival as a species-- the more time goes on, the greater the likelihood is that a central point of failure (especially in a giant swath of identical plants) will be compromised.
A post from me to comp.robotics.misc in 1999 about Silent Running drones which spawned a thread with 32 messages:
https://groups.google.com/foru...
---
Anyone remember the drones (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) from the sci-fi movie Silent Running?
Some links: ...
They have always captivated me, and were an early influence in getting me interested in robotics and AI.
I particularly liked the scene where all three worked together to perform a medical operation.
I've long wanted to build some robots like these for gardening and maintenance. It seems to me that multifuncional drones such as those (with changeable end effectors) would be very valuable in agriculture, by reducing the need for pesticides and fertilizers through picking off pests, pulling weeds, and spot applying fertilizer, and by not compacting the soil like tractors.
Has anyone given any though to what it would take to make such drones today?
How much would it cost to build such a system (part cost, design time cost, assembly time cost)?
How long would it take?
How much could it lift?
How long would the battery (fuel cell?) life be?
How well could they be made to walk or climb stairs with today's technology?
Anyone out there started such a project to clone these drones?
Any advice on where to find more information on their design, or maybe the originals made for the movies?
Would that design concept (one armed, collaborative walking robots, three feet high) now be considered obsolete (i.e. compared to the post model in Hans Moravec's latest book "Robot")?
Could a business case be made today for a company to build such robots? Or instead, would anyone be interested in collaborating on an open source design for robots that looked like those?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.