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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."
But we're trying to grow the weed!
I would pay a lot for an outdoor-does-it-all device.
I believe you can train a child/wife for this.
I have a yard that is nothing but weeds. I need a robot that treats anything taller than it as a weed.
Taking your comment po-faced (which yeah, I shouldn't be doing...) actually, I have been asking my children to help out more in the garden right now. For straight mowing it's easy, for hedge trimming I do the hedges and they load into the bins.
But weeding? Weeding is a bit more awkward and is rarely done by anybody with any great diligence. I also back on to a farmer's field, so I get a lot of stuff making its way over. Yeah - weeding for an inexpensive price I can see happening.
As I say, only real trouble I can think of is dogs. I have three, and the garden needs an amount of diligence because of it.
Last, but pretty major, concern would be grass. The video showa it working on dirt only, not on grass. It's saying the detection mechanism is 1 inch = weed - well, how about slightly overgrown grass? Would it sort that out or would it just spend its entire life trying to cut the grass? The video doesn't mention grass once, which does make me a bit suspicious.
Aah - and immediately I post, I find the answer in one of the Kickstarter FAQs:
Will Tertill work on my lawn?
Tertill is designed for home vegetable and flower gardens. Because it uses a hieght based approach, it is not suitable for use on grass.
OK, sold status rescinded. I need something that would handle grass, and I suspect many more people would as well.
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.
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.
Real life is overrated.
In my tomato garden I use cheap landscape fabric with 6" or more of straw over it. This works well & the weeds that can get through I can pull while watering.
Maybe an industrial version of this could help farmers with weeds like Pigweed. No more buying special seeds & spraying chemicals that the weeds will always develop immunity to. Interesting podcast from NPR's Planet Money: Pigweed Killer
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
What uses is this in a "Garden"? Kill plants by height? That is useful in one instance only....when you are growing grass.
Also, I like dandelions, what good is a robot that kills those? Nope, wake me up when it identifies plants before killing them, then you have something I might care about.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Roomba up to 700 & 800 series are dumb, just aimlessly wandering around until eventually covering the whole surface.
There isn't much data to collect, and the device only transmit wirelessly using infrared (remote control, virtual walls) and some ZigBee-like (to remotely start the virtual walls, and by the bigger remote).
In short: they aren't able to do any telemetry.
The 900 series is the only one with a camera, that has a concept of its environment (it can map it and has a notion of its position) and has wifi connectivity.
unless you have some really weird dwelling place, just get a 790 or 890 if you're concerned about telemetry.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Gene Simmons first appearance without makeup.
I would pay a lot for an outdoor-does-it-all device.
I believe you can train a child/wife for this.
My kids love to "help" in the garden. The biggest problem is they get overly enthusiatic, and pull up nice plants when weeding. As for the wife, I always say, she's not a farmer's wife, I'm a farmer's husband. She does the bulk of the planting, weeding, etc.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
The way it usually works is the Farmer or Crop Production Services company sprays the field with glyphosate, which kills everything, especially the weeds. 2 weeks later the land is tilled, just enough to plant, then the field is planted. After about 2 weeks the crop had germinated, and they spray the field with a Pre-emergent herbicide so any weed seed that have not germinated are prevented from germinating; leaving the field almost weed free until after harvest.. Now little Suzie can eat without going into anaphylaxis due to being allergic to weeds in her food.
Now for the heresy, weeds are usually good for a garden, their roots instinctively go deep, breaking through hard-pan that crop plants can't and they draw up minerals and moisture from deeper in the ground. Let them grow until just before they flower and cut them down and leave them residue on the ground as mulch.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
WTF... No hyperspectral sensors /w fancy ANN fueled expert trained CV?
We want a sentient weed terminators on wheels that works anywhere even if it requires wireless streaming to a desktop computer running fancy CUDA code to figure out what to "delete".
This product is a crop out.