Roomba Inventor Launches 'Tertill', a Weed-Killing Robot For Your Garden

mcpublic writes: iRobot veteran and Roomba co-inventor, Joe Jones is a modest man with a big mission: to create robots that make agriculture more efficient, less tedious, and yes, maybe even one day feed the world. After a decade at Harvest Automation building greenhouse robots, his new team at Franklin Robotics has developed Tertill, an affordable, waterproof, solar-powered robot that continuously whacks weeds around your yard. MIT Technology Review calls Tertill "a Roomba for your garden." Today the Kickstarter campaign went live and already they are well on the way to their goal. According to the Kickstarter campaign, Tertill is solar powered, chemical free, waterproof and Bluetooth compatible. It doesn't actually pull the weeds from your garden, instead it uses a "spinning string trimmer" to trim the weeds down to ground level. Since Tertill will be trimming weeds daily, the company says the weeds will eventually run out of nutrients to continue growing, and therefore will die and decompose. How does it know what's a weed and what's a plant? "A plant tall enough to touch the front of Tertill's shell activates a sensor that makes the robot turn away. A plant short enough to pass under Tertill's shell, though, activates a different sensor that turns on the weed cutter. Because Tertill's approach is height-based, put one of the provided plant collars around short plants until they are tall enough for Tertill to recognize. When Tertill approaches the collar, it will recognize it and turn away."

Comments

Re:Sold!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would pay a lot for an outdoor-does-it-all device.

I believe you can train a child/wife for this.

You obviously never had a wife or child. Getting, training and keeping them is a lot harder and more expensive than a robotic device.

Sadly, i doubt the robotic gardener will be successful. Not because it's a bad idea, but due to simple economics.

It will be manufactured by whatever Chinese sweatshop gives him the lowest price and the resulting product will be low quality garbage. Not to mention the millions of their own cheap knock-offs they will sell. Robotic gardeners will get a bad reputation and quickly fade away as just another fad.

An awful lot of assumptions

[dabadab]

As far as I can see this assumes that whatever you have planted is well-spaced, doesn't get bushy and weeds are well-behaved and don't grow too close to your vegetables. (In my actual garden none of these assumptions are true.)

Also, there's the problem that it can maintain a garden up to 9(!) square meters.

It looks a lot more like a science fair project than something actually usable.

If you can plan your garden around this, it works

[RobinH]

Like most successful automation, it works well if you can plan the activity to suit the tool. For instance, at home I just don't buy clothes that I can't wash in a washing machine, or dishes that I can't wash in a dishwasher. Once you're willing to make compromises, then automation offers some significant advantages. In this case, if you planned your vegetable garden around this, it could work well.

Of course people don't want to compromise. I think a major reason that Roomba's are more of a toy is people aren't willing to take the step of changing their living area to work well with a robot vacuum.