5 ms·
That looks awesome! Here's a comment I wrote earlier about the topic: I've been thinking about a suite of robots on the residential level that could not only m
by ph0rque 8y ago
That looks awesome! Here's a comment I wrote earlier about the topic:
I've been thinking about a suite of robots on the residential level that could not only mow the grass and edge it, but also shovel snow, and perhaps eventually prune plants and pick the harvest. If a base, plus a suite of attachments, could be affordable at less than $5k retail, I would buy it.
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoAwesome! That price might be hard to achieve any time soon. Mostly because the engineering team will be very expensive, so the price will have to be many multiples of the unit cost for some time. Such a thing might be possible at a $20k price in five to ten years, and a service company could offer that work on contract to many different households. As robotics matures as a field, the engineering costs to accomplish this will go down, as will per unit costs. Maybe in 20 years time such a multi bot could be available. It’s hard to predict the future and probably of questionable merit. That said I’ve become much more pessimistic about timelines for robotics as I’ve continued to work in the industry. My hope though is that open source robotics can keep pace with the industry as time goes on, just as open source operating systems have kept pace with their closed source counterparts. That way people will have options when the technology does become feasible.
- ph0rque 8y agoThanks for the insightful comment. If you ever want to hop on a call and talk about micro-farming and robotics, I'm all for it.
- ph0rque 8y agoAlso, after some thinking... what's the current price of just the parts?
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoAbout $1500 including batteries. $400 of that is motor controllers, which could be reduced to $130 using Odrive instead of VESC for motor controllers. This is for the remote control version. If you want it self driving, consider the cost of a beefy mobile computer and sensors. I am currently working on a reinforcement learning system that will use cameras and the $1300 NVIDIA Jetson Xavier computer for autonomy.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoWhy, in particular have you become more pessimistic about the timelines for robotics? I've also been headed this way, but it's as a complete outsider of the field simply extrapolating directionality comparing promises to deliverables with the former exponentially outpacing the seemingly linear, at best, progress of the latter. Interestingly the same is also true of many other fields from genetics, to AI, to molecular nanotechnology. The latter being a radical example of something going from 'the next big thing to revolutionize society' to all but disappearing in a period of < 10 years.
- mymythisisthis 8y agoStop growing grass, plant bushes, and clover. Don't use gasoline lawnmowers. Lawns are very silly things. If you don't care about energy costs, you could put a hotwater system under your driveway, I've seen a few of these now. I think one major issue is getting people from the city to the farms during harvest time. It's a problem of coordination and transport.
- ph0rque 8y agoOh I know. I have a food forest, and aquaponics system, and some fence gardens. But I can't get rid of the grass (yet) because of the HOA (I did plant clover in it). I'm just saying this would be a good space to start, if the robotics dev economics made sense: the market is there.
- oh_sigh 8y agoNice how it is always other people's things that are silly. Lawns are silly in places like Las Vegas, but maybe not particularly silly in a place like Michigan or New Jersey.
- abakker 8y agoYeah, I mean, in CT ours grew whether we wanted it or not. the choice was grass or trees, and its not great when trees grow literally right up to your house. if you wanted a buffer it either had to paved, gravel, or grass.
- swish_bob 8y agoAnd paving in places with a lot of precipitation has some unpleasant side-effects.
- Johnny555 8y agoMy parents' NJ lawn needs a lot of maintenance -- they use a lawn service that mows the law every 7 - 10 days, fertilizes a few times a year, maintains the sprinklers, does some kind of regular weed control, and took care of a mole problem last summer. Still seems silly.