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I am currently making a suspended robot to work on that exact problem. I hope to achieve what Farm Bot does but on a much higher scale. I live in Japan where mo

by Iv 8y ago

I am currently making a suspended robot to work on that exact problem. I hope to achieve what Farm Bot does but on a much higher scale. I live in Japan where most of the fields are ricefields. Wheels or legs are not really an option under these extremely muddy conditions.

tomcam 8y ago
Would love to hear more about this
- Iv 8y ago
  I wish this post happened a week later! We are currently making a website, it should have been online last week but we missed the deadline. I have a small working prototype (2x2m area), I am currently changing some parts so that it can be made 100% with off-the-shelf parts. Next step is trying it on a 10x10m area and then see how far it can go. Without making it particularly sturdy, it was able to lift 4 kg and has a pretty good movement repeatability even if totally "blind" (I am currently working on its vision system), two things that drone would have a hard time duplicating in outdoor conditions. I can PM you later when we have all the things set up if you want. Or we can just chat here.
  - 4b11b4 8y ago
    I had a similar idea of making a suspended robot farming robot (e.g. it may hang in between two fences of a backyard or between trees...) Do you have any contact info?
    - Iv 8y ago
      Sure: info@fae-bot.org (the website is mostly a placeholder right now with old pictures of an early prototype)
      - kaveh_h 8y ago
        Interesting, so how does the winch system work is it actually pulled and released from each pole base? Are they going to be modularized so they can pass tools along multiple such systems? Have you thought about harvesting and collecting?
        Iv 8y ago
        I use a winch based on a stepper motor. Everything is modular so that it is easy to make a robot with just 3 wires or with 8 for 6 DOF experiments. Passing tools among a neighboring system is going to be hard as there is a "dead zone" bordering the rectangle drawn by the pole but there may be a way to smartly cross the wires so that two system may share an area where they could pass around tools. Harvesting is actually, counter-intuitively, a low priority task IMO. This is usually a single day of work, and this is the one with the highest stake, where things going wrong can jeopardize your whole harvest. People will want to be present for it I think. What needs to be automated first are the tedious tasks that need to be done repeatedly : weeding, monitoring, watering. About harvesting, a farmer friend proposed something interesting: just pass bags/baskets from the field's side to the place when the human is inside the field. Ricefields are very muddy and if you work in the middle of one, doing back and forth to the border is really tedious.
  - raihansaputra 8y ago
    hey I'm also interested in this. Mind shooting me an email when the website is ready? hello [at] myusername.com
  - tomcam 8y ago
    Congratulations! Please use the email address in my profile and feel free to put me on any email list you have.
  - carapace 8y ago
    I'm building something similar but for litter collection. In order to make the system mobile I'm making a sort of tiny tractor that relocates the bases of the support struts (I use a tripod.) You can have separate symbiotic fleets of static "heads" (tripod+wirebot) that are moved by mobile "rovers". This lets you optimize the system a little better, since most of the time the head units will be working and largely stationary, so a small fleet of rovers could be enough to handle a large fleet of processors. For ricefields I think you might sink stepping stones in a triangle "grid", maybe concrete cones about a meter long and 10cm at the base, inverted and stuck in the mud. The distance between them would be fixed by the span of the suspended robot. You would also want "vascular" conduits to transport material to and from the working heads. These aren't necessarily physical tubes or conveyor belts, they could be made of simple cargo drones like streams of ants. You could make bridge or rail units that fit between the stepping stones for temporary reconfigurable transport networks. (If your cargo drones are sure-footed and reliable these could be simple planks.) Also, have you heard of Hangprinter? https://vitana.se/opr3d/tbear/ https://vitana.se/opr3d/tbear/ (I have no affiliation w/ it.) It's a "RepRap hanging from the ceiling"
    - Iv 8y ago
      Interesting! Actually my dream would be to make a system deployable by a fleet of drones. Rovers are actually complex to move, especially in an uncontrolled environment with lots of plants. I don't think any rice farmer would like to put concrete blocks in their fields unless every task is reliably automated: they depend on machines to prepare, plant and harvest the rice and a stone in the middle of a ricefield would make these steps harder. I know that there are several projects using wirebots for 3d printing. It usually allows for a bigger printing volume than regular CNC-like designs, and I think they must be able to have a high precision too. I am wondering what is the limitation there.

by Iv 8y ago

tomcam 8y ago

Would love to hear more about this

Iv 8y ago
I wish this post happened a week later! We are currently making a website, it should have been online last week but we missed the deadline. I have a small working prototype (2x2m area), I am currently changing some parts so that it can be made 100% with off-the-shelf parts. Next step is trying it on a 10x10m area and then see how far it can go. Without making it particularly sturdy, it was able to lift 4 kg and has a pretty good movement repeatability even if totally "blind" (I am currently working on its vision system), two things that drone would have a hard time duplicating in outdoor conditions. I can PM you later when we have all the things set up if you want. Or we can just chat here.
- 4b11b4 8y ago
  I had a similar idea of making a suspended robot farming robot (e.g. it may hang in between two fences of a backyard or between trees...) Do you have any contact info?
  - Iv 8y ago
    Sure: info@fae-bot.org (the website is mostly a placeholder right now with old pictures of an early prototype)
    - kaveh_h 8y ago
      Interesting, so how does the winch system work is it actually pulled and released from each pole base? Are they going to be modularized so they can pass tools along multiple such systems? Have you thought about harvesting and collecting?
      - Iv 8y ago
        I use a winch based on a stepper motor. Everything is modular so that it is easy to make a robot with just 3 wires or with 8 for 6 DOF experiments. Passing tools among a neighboring system is going to be hard as there is a "dead zone" bordering the rectangle drawn by the pole but there may be a way to smartly cross the wires so that two system may share an area where they could pass around tools. Harvesting is actually, counter-intuitively, a low priority task IMO. This is usually a single day of work, and this is the one with the highest stake, where things going wrong can jeopardize your whole harvest. People will want to be present for it I think. What needs to be automated first are the tedious tasks that need to be done repeatedly : weeding, monitoring, watering. About harvesting, a farmer friend proposed something interesting: just pass bags/baskets from the field's side to the place when the human is inside the field. Ricefields are very muddy and if you work in the middle of one, doing back and forth to the border is really tedious.
- raihansaputra 8y ago
  hey I'm also interested in this. Mind shooting me an email when the website is ready? hello [at] myusername.com
- tomcam 8y ago
  Congratulations! Please use the email address in my profile and feel free to put me on any email list you have.
- carapace 8y ago
  I'm building something similar but for litter collection. In order to make the system mobile I'm making a sort of tiny tractor that relocates the bases of the support struts (I use a tripod.) You can have separate symbiotic fleets of static "heads" (tripod+wirebot) that are moved by mobile "rovers". This lets you optimize the system a little better, since most of the time the head units will be working and largely stationary, so a small fleet of rovers could be enough to handle a large fleet of processors. For ricefields I think you might sink stepping stones in a triangle "grid", maybe concrete cones about a meter long and 10cm at the base, inverted and stuck in the mud. The distance between them would be fixed by the span of the suspended robot. You would also want "vascular" conduits to transport material to and from the working heads. These aren't necessarily physical tubes or conveyor belts, they could be made of simple cargo drones like streams of ants. You could make bridge or rail units that fit between the stepping stones for temporary reconfigurable transport networks. (If your cargo drones are sure-footed and reliable these could be simple planks.) Also, have you heard of Hangprinter? https://vitana.se/opr3d/tbear/ https://vitana.se/opr3d/tbear/ (I have no affiliation w/ it.) It's a "RepRap hanging from the ceiling"
  - Iv 8y ago
    Interesting! Actually my dream would be to make a system deployable by a fleet of drones. Rovers are actually complex to move, especially in an uncontrolled environment with lots of plants. I don't think any rice farmer would like to put concrete blocks in their fields unless every task is reliably automated: they depend on machines to prepare, plant and harvest the rice and a stone in the middle of a ricefield would make these steps harder. I know that there are several projects using wirebots for 3d printing. It usually allows for a bigger printing volume than regular CNC-like designs, and I think they must be able to have a high precision too. I am wondering what is the limitation there.