5 ms·

Show HN: Sowbot – Open-hardware agricultural robot (ROS2, RTK GPS)

181 points by Sabrees 7mo ago

Sowbot is an open-hardware agricultural robot designed to close the "prototype gap" that kills most agri-robotics startups and research projects — the 18+ months spent on drivers, networking, safety watchdogs, and UI before you can even start on the thing you actually care about. The hardware is built around a stackable 10×10cm compute module with two ARM Cortex-A55 SBCs — one for ROS 2 navigation/EKF localisation, one dedicated to vision/YOLO inference — connected via a single ethernet cable. Centimetre-level positioning via dual RTK GNSS, CAN bus for field comms, and real-time motor control via ESP32 running Lizard firmware. Everything — schematics, PCB layouts, firmware — is under open licences. The software stack runs on RoSys/Field Friend (for teams who want fast iteration) or DevKit ROS (for teams already in the ROS ecosystem). The idea is that a lab in one country can reproduce another lab's experiment by sharing a Docker image. Current status: the Open Core brain is largely fabricated, the full-size Sowbot body has a detailed BOM but isn't yet assembled, and we have two smaller dev platforms (Mini and Pico) in various stages of testing. We're a small volunteer team and we're looking for contributors — hardware, ROS, firmware, docs, whatever you can offer. The best place to start is our Discord: https://discord.gg/SvztEBr4KZ https://discord.gg/SvztEBr4KZ — we have a weekly call if you'd prefer to just show up and chat. GitHub: https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/feldfreund_devkit_ros/tree/caatinga-dev https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/feldfreund_devkit_ros/tre...

beachy 7mo ago
This is the future, good luck to you
MoonWalk 7mo ago
Great name, if nothing else!
- Sabrees 7mo ago
  Thanks, bit conflicted about it TBH, it's primarily/initially a weeding robot, although I do dream of expanding it to do harvesting, and yes potentially sowing too down the line. Strapping something like the Jang P6 to it is probably feasible https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang For the harvester it would be a bolt on for https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester or maybe https://reagtools.co.uk/products/babyleaf-harvester-80cm https://reagtools.co.uk/products/babyleaf-harvester-80cm (I grow green salads)
  - tda 7mo ago
    And for weeding?
    - Sabrees 7mo ago
      Initially keep it simple; Mechanical for between row weeding. I'll probably start strapping a couple of these to some linear actuators: https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-cultivator-46007 https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-... (they work surprisingly well) Beyond that for in-row weeding a engraving laser on a Delta: https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/master/hardware#readme https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/m... Or if I'm feeling rich by then this third party weeder looks pretty good https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER
      - tda 7mo ago
        I sometimes help out at a hobby vineyard of 0.7 hectare; weeding in the row is a lot of manual labour. Your platform seems like a good fit. I like tinkering and robotics, what kind of price point are you aiming for?
        Sabrees 7mo ago
        As cheap as possible, and no cheaper than that. In my head it's £3-£5k, so by the time it's useful probably a bit more than that.
        falkenstein 7mo ago
        a simple ride on mower with a diy inter row disc (basically just a belt and pulley with a spring) may be enough. probably just get sonebody with a tractor and inter row disc weeder to do the job for you.
      - TGower 7mo ago
        What's the plan for using an engraving laser in open air without blinding a neighbor? Does the bot fully roll over the target area before firing or something?
- rrr_oh_man 7mo ago
  A joke that's whooshing over my head?
  - Sabrees 7mo ago
    A robot that Sows seeds..
    - rrr_oh_man 7mo ago
      Aaaaaargh. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ Thank you.
dylan604 7mo ago
From a video somewhere in the page: "The aim is to make food production more sustainable and efficient" yet requires a web app. I'd hope that you can run the server side on a local machine and not require cloud connectivity.
- Sabrees 7mo ago
  The web app runs locally from the robot. No cloud. Once we reach autonomy (still some way away) you shouldn't have to use that much either.
  - Sabrees 7mo ago
    Quite interested in running robot<>robot and robot<>Farm comms over https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/ but that's a side project off a side project..
dheera 7mo ago
I highly encourage you to go visit farms sooner rather than later, especially during the rainy seasons and winter when farmers are really at work preparing for the next season. The kind of conditions robots need to deal with in that environment is no joke. I also notice you're using the BNO055 -- if you need an C++ I2C ROS driver for it I wrote one (https://github.com/dheera/ros-imu-bno055 https://github.com/dheera/ros-imu-bno055). I think the one in the ROS apt-get repository is written in Python but they claimed the package name before I did
- Sabrees 7mo ago
  Good advice on farms. I do live on a farm, so somewhat familiar with mud! Many of the worst problems are caused by moving 20ton tractors around IMHO, one of the problems small scale ag robotics may help with. Will check out your Bno055 currently using the upstream one in Lizard https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/BNO055ESP32.h https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/... https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/BNO055ESP32.cpp https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/... Any review of that welcome too of course.
jvanderbot 7mo ago
What's your payload? Where are the seeds? How are they deposited? Recommend going to a farm right now to see how this works in production. For the most part, you can autonomously sow using GPS. But the farmer just rides along.
- Sabrees 7mo ago
  Payload is whatever you (or your startup) want it to be. For me personally mechanical between row weeding is step one, then laser in-row weeding. 1. These on some linear actuators: https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-cultivator-46007 https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-... (they work surprisingly well) 2. Beyond that for in-row weeding a engraving laser on a Delta: https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/master/hardware#readme https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/m... Or if I'm feeling rich by then this third party weeder looks pretty good https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER 3. For Seeding my salad crop https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang 4. Harvesting my salad crop https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester I live on a farm, I have sold salad commercially, these are largely tools I already use and own, just moved about by motors rather than muscles. This is a smaller scale thing than arable. We're talking a step up from manual horticulture (which is actually what still feeds much of the world)
pixelsub 7mo ago
[dead]
sgillen 7mo ago
Very cool! shameless self promotion but check out greenwave-monitor[1] for the 'Diagnostics TUI'. I'll get it into the buildfarm soon. [1] https://github.com/NVIDIA-ISAAC-ROS/greenwave_monitor https://github.com/NVIDIA-ISAAC-ROS/greenwave_monitor
- Sabrees 7mo ago
  Nice, thanks! looks like a good one..
cpgxiii 7mo ago
> The hardware is built around a stackable 10×10cm compute module with two ARM Cortex-A55 SBCs — one for ROS 2 navigation/EKF localisation, one dedicated to vision/YOLO inference — connected via a single ethernet cable. I will preface this by saying that I have nothing against ARM per se, that my employer/team supported a good chunk of the work for making ROS 2 actually work on arm64, and that there is some good hardware out there. I really don't understand why startups and research projects keep using weird ARM SBCs for their robots. The best of these SBCs is still vastly shittier in terms of software support and stability than any random Chinese Intel ADL-N box. The only reasons to use (weird) ARM SBCs in robots are that either (1) you are using a Jetson for Jetson things (i.e. Nvidia libraries), or (2) you have a product which requires serious cost optimization to be produced at a large scale. Otherwise you are just committing yourselves and your users/customers to a future of terrible-to-nonexistent support and adding significantly to the amount of work you need to bring up the new system and port existing tools to it.
- Sabrees 7mo ago
  If you can send me an open hardware Intel, or Jetson I'd happily use it. Part of the point of this for me is to see what's possible with open hardware (down to chip level at least)
  - Neywiny 7mo ago
    Framework? Maybe?
    - Sabrees 7mo ago
      Framweork have done the best they can within the confines of Intel licensing, still a long way from being able to fabricate it though https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tree/main/Mainboard https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tre... In a few years we'll all be using more open RISCV stuff of course.
  - cpgxiii 7mo ago
    There are a variety of x86 products with Coreboot support, if what you are looking for is firmware openness. If what you are looking for is PCB design openness, the options are much fewer, but at that point you are probably optimizing for an overly niche objective. > Part of the point of this for me is to see what's possible with open hardware (down to chip level at least) I appreciate the idea, but this is essentially saying "this project will prioritize a specific choice of one (core) piece of hardware to the detriment of everything else, users included". Approximately none of your potential users are going to benefit from the "openness" of the SBC versus that of a more broadly-supported platform (I say "openness" because the reality of SBCs is that actually finding a usefully performant one that is completely blob-free is almost impossible). Open hardware means very little if it isn't running an upstream kernel and userland.
agentifysh 7mo ago
outside of sowing would you consider some open source drones like the new DJI with agriculture payload attached to it. or some automated green house with open source designs. love the name sowbot.
- Sabrees 7mo ago
  I did recently automate a greenhouse (heating, Hydroponics, fans, lights) it was just R&D rather than commercial so just used home assistant for it. I did sketch out a slightly more 'professionalised' version, but haven't built it yet https://github.com/samuk/IoT-Greenhouse-Temperature-and-Irrigation-Controller-Node-Red https://github.com/samuk/IoT-Greenhouse-Temperature-and-Irri... I'd be pleasantly surprised if DJI had done anything open source, Ardupilot is pretty capable of course. I really want to automate the time consuming labour parts of horticulture, for me that's mostly weeding and to a lesser extent harvesting.
lorenzohess 7mo ago
Looks great for a prototype. Has any modeling, simulation, or analysis been done of its off-road performance, i.e. mobility, GO/NOGO, motive efficiency, maneuverability on deformable terrain? This is critical for agricultural applications. Has any stress analysis been done on the frame? Looks to me like it could use a couple more triangles to reinforce those rectangles. Have you designed a skid-steering controller for it? Off-road skid steering can be quite variable obviously depending on terrain properties.
- Sabrees 7mo ago
  Rosys (a middleware layer https://github.com/zauberzeug/rosys https://github.com/zauberzeug/rosys) has rosys.driving.Odometer and rosys.driving.Steerer it's essentially a differential drive kinematic model. Hoping RTK dual-F9P moving-base setup (M4 in the roadmap) largely sidesteps the worst of this — NAV-RELPOSNED gives us a real heading vector independent of wheel odometry, and the robot_localisation EKF can weight RTK heavily and odometry lightly when GNSS quality is good.
- Sabrees 7mo ago
  The current simulation is underdeveloped but can be found here https://github.com/samuk/caatingarobotics/tree/jazzy/src/agro_robot_sim https://github.com/samuk/caatingarobotics/tree/jazzy/src/agr... The frame will almost certainly need more triangles
defrost 7mo ago
Australia's been working with various types of robotics in agriculture since 1980 at least [1], these days, for open field work there are several families of solution in developmental progress. One leading contender is SwarmFarm Robotics, based out of Queensland. * https://advance.qld.gov.au/innovation-in-queensland/innovation-stories/agtech-pioneer-swarmfarm-robotics-transforms-farming-with-autonomous-solutions https://advance.qld.gov.au/innovation-in-queensland/innovati... * https://www.swarmfarm.com/ https://www.swarmfarm.com/ For interest, here's a recent opinion / demonstration from an unassociated Australian farmer considering a purchase. The farm is Tom’s Brook, a grain farm located in Esperance in Western Australia. It’s a family operated business growing a mixture of Wheat, Barley and Canola on 4500 hectares (11 200 Acres). Sizewise is pretty much bang on the average W.Australian grain acerage. Seeing a Swarm Bot in Action (20 min) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM The unit pair in action here, autonomous tractor pulling intelligent boom spray, has had 10,000 acres of operation prior to this customer demonstration. Unloaded weight ~ 3.5 metric tonne, loaded approx 5 tonne. Runs at about 13 hectares per hour, max speed 10 km/hour. Advantages of "intelligence" during operation are reduced spray usage (basic green on dirt detection, and green shape on mixed green patterns) and weather patience (happy to sit idle until wind and humidity are optimal) 70 odd Comments include feedback from other farmers already using such agribots, eg: Just rolled over 12,000 hrs on our swarmbot. 4 years, 3000hr a year, doesn't get into the shed much. The first 12 minutes are Vendor + Farmer discussing bot in action, remaining eight minutes is farmer and hands discussing pros and cons. -- [1] Robot Sheep Shearing (1985) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZAh2zv7TMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZAh2zv7TMM
gaudystead 7mo ago
I'm not sure how much more work is currently being done on a project I'd heard about in the past, but you might be interested in seeing if you can collaborate/learn from Open Source Ecology: https://www.opensourceecology.org/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/
- culi 7mo ago
  Wow nice to see the website has been updated in 2025. I followed it for years but it seemed to not get much updates. Folks might also be interested in the Precious Plastic community which has a global network of "microfactories" built around a set of open-source machines made for recycling and reusing plastics https://www.preciousplastic.com/ https://www.preciousplastic.com/ https://community.preciousplastic.com/map https://community.preciousplastic.com/map Also as far as fundamental machines go, this 2d printer is expected to come out later this year https://www.opentools.studio/ https://www.opentools.studio/
umairnadeem123 7mo ago
[dead]
vb7132 7mo ago
Your discord link doesn't seem to work. One basic question: As a hardware noob, where do I start? Maybe having a minimal getting started guide could really help. Nevertheless, the initiative looks cool!
adrian_b 7mo ago
I wonder how good is the cooling of the stacked "robot brain". It would be nice to see some temperatures in relevant points, when the computer is stress tested in the closed waterproof case and a hot ambient. The Cortex-A55 based CPU has low power consumption, but it is not negligible and without a heatsink it may overheat and throttle. Moreover, in a closed box, one may need some means to transfer the heat from the stacked electronics to the aluminum walls of the box. Finding suitable means may be more complex for this design, because of the curious choice of using 2 weak SBCs instead of 1 good SBC, so there are 2 sets of CPU + memories that must be cooled. From the provided pictures, I cannot see how the electronics would be cooled well enough, especially when working outdoors during a hot day.

181 points by Sabrees 7mo ago

beachy 7mo ago

This is the future, good luck to you

MoonWalk 7mo ago

Great name, if nothing else!

Sabrees 7mo ago
Thanks, bit conflicted about it TBH, it's primarily/initially a weeding robot, although I do dream of expanding it to do harvesting, and yes potentially sowing too down the line. Strapping something like the Jang P6 to it is probably feasible https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang For the harvester it would be a bolt on for https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester or maybe https://reagtools.co.uk/products/babyleaf-harvester-80cm https://reagtools.co.uk/products/babyleaf-harvester-80cm (I grow green salads)
- tda 7mo ago
  And for weeding?
  - Sabrees 7mo ago
    Initially keep it simple; Mechanical for between row weeding. I'll probably start strapping a couple of these to some linear actuators: https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-cultivator-46007 https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-... (they work surprisingly well) Beyond that for in-row weeding a engraving laser on a Delta: https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/master/hardware#readme https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/m... Or if I'm feeling rich by then this third party weeder looks pretty good https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER
    - tda 7mo ago
      I sometimes help out at a hobby vineyard of 0.7 hectare; weeding in the row is a lot of manual labour. Your platform seems like a good fit. I like tinkering and robotics, what kind of price point are you aiming for?
      - Sabrees 7mo ago
        As cheap as possible, and no cheaper than that. In my head it's £3-£5k, so by the time it's useful probably a bit more than that.
      - falkenstein 7mo ago
        a simple ride on mower with a diy inter row disc (basically just a belt and pulley with a spring) may be enough. probably just get sonebody with a tractor and inter row disc weeder to do the job for you.
    - TGower 7mo ago
      What's the plan for using an engraving laser in open air without blinding a neighbor? Does the bot fully roll over the target area before firing or something?
rrr_oh_man 7mo ago
A joke that's whooshing over my head?
- Sabrees 7mo ago
  A robot that Sows seeds..
  - rrr_oh_man 7mo ago
    Aaaaaargh. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ Thank you.

dylan604 7mo ago

From a video somewhere in the page: "The aim is to make food production more sustainable and efficient" yet requires a web app. I'd hope that you can run the server side on a local machine and not require cloud connectivity.

Sabrees 7mo ago
The web app runs locally from the robot. No cloud. Once we reach autonomy (still some way away) you shouldn't have to use that much either.
- Sabrees 7mo ago
  Quite interested in running robot<>robot and robot<>Farm comms over https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/ but that's a side project off a side project..

dheera 7mo ago

I highly encourage you to go visit farms sooner rather than later, especially during the rainy seasons and winter when farmers are really at work preparing for the next season. The kind of conditions robots need to deal with in that environment is no joke. I also notice you're using the BNO055 -- if you need an C++ I2C ROS driver for it I wrote one (https://github.com/dheera/ros-imu-bno055 https://github.com/dheera/ros-imu-bno055). I think the one in the ROS apt-get repository is written in Python but they claimed the package name before I did

Sabrees 7mo ago
Good advice on farms. I do live on a farm, so somewhat familiar with mud! Many of the worst problems are caused by moving 20ton tractors around IMHO, one of the problems small scale ag robotics may help with. Will check out your Bno055 currently using the upstream one in Lizard https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/BNO055ESP32.h https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/... https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/BNO055ESP32.cpp https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/... Any review of that welcome too of course.

jvanderbot 7mo ago

What's your payload? Where are the seeds? How are they deposited? Recommend going to a farm right now to see how this works in production. For the most part, you can autonomously sow using GPS. But the farmer just rides along.

Sabrees 7mo ago
Payload is whatever you (or your startup) want it to be. For me personally mechanical between row weeding is step one, then laser in-row weeding. 1. These on some linear actuators: https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-cultivator-46007 https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-... (they work surprisingly well) 2. Beyond that for in-row weeding a engraving laser on a Delta: https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/master/hardware#readme https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/m... Or if I'm feeling rich by then this third party weeder looks pretty good https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER 3. For Seeding my salad crop https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang 4. Harvesting my salad crop https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester I live on a farm, I have sold salad commercially, these are largely tools I already use and own, just moved about by motors rather than muscles. This is a smaller scale thing than arable. We're talking a step up from manual horticulture (which is actually what still feeds much of the world)

pixelsub 7mo ago

[dead]

sgillen 7mo ago

Very cool! shameless self promotion but check out greenwave-monitor[1] for the 'Diagnostics TUI'. I'll get it into the buildfarm soon. [1] https://github.com/NVIDIA-ISAAC-ROS/greenwave_monitor https://github.com/NVIDIA-ISAAC-ROS/greenwave_monitor

Sabrees 7mo ago
Nice, thanks! looks like a good one..

cpgxiii 7mo ago

> The hardware is built around a stackable 10×10cm compute module with two ARM Cortex-A55 SBCs — one for ROS 2 navigation/EKF localisation, one dedicated to vision/YOLO inference — connected via a single ethernet cable. I will preface this by saying that I have nothing against ARM per se, that my employer/team supported a good chunk of the work for making ROS 2 actually work on arm64, and that there is some good hardware out there. I really don't understand why startups and research projects keep using weird ARM SBCs for their robots. The best of these SBCs is still vastly shittier in terms of software support and stability than any random Chinese Intel ADL-N box. The only reasons to use (weird) ARM SBCs in robots are that either (1) you are using a Jetson for Jetson things (i.e. Nvidia libraries), or (2) you have a product which requires serious cost optimization to be produced at a large scale. Otherwise you are just committing yourselves and your users/customers to a future of terrible-to-nonexistent support and adding significantly to the amount of work you need to bring up the new system and port existing tools to it.

Sabrees 7mo ago
If you can send me an open hardware Intel, or Jetson I'd happily use it. Part of the point of this for me is to see what's possible with open hardware (down to chip level at least)
- Neywiny 7mo ago
  Framework? Maybe?
  - Sabrees 7mo ago
    Framweork have done the best they can within the confines of Intel licensing, still a long way from being able to fabricate it though https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tree/main/Mainboard https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tre... In a few years we'll all be using more open RISCV stuff of course.
- cpgxiii 7mo ago
  There are a variety of x86 products with Coreboot support, if what you are looking for is firmware openness. If what you are looking for is PCB design openness, the options are much fewer, but at that point you are probably optimizing for an overly niche objective. > Part of the point of this for me is to see what's possible with open hardware (down to chip level at least) I appreciate the idea, but this is essentially saying "this project will prioritize a specific choice of one (core) piece of hardware to the detriment of everything else, users included". Approximately none of your potential users are going to benefit from the "openness" of the SBC versus that of a more broadly-supported platform (I say "openness" because the reality of SBCs is that actually finding a usefully performant one that is completely blob-free is almost impossible). Open hardware means very little if it isn't running an upstream kernel and userland.

agentifysh 7mo ago

outside of sowing would you consider some open source drones like the new DJI with agriculture payload attached to it. or some automated green house with open source designs. love the name sowbot.

Sabrees 7mo ago
I did recently automate a greenhouse (heating, Hydroponics, fans, lights) it was just R&D rather than commercial so just used home assistant for it. I did sketch out a slightly more 'professionalised' version, but haven't built it yet https://github.com/samuk/IoT-Greenhouse-Temperature-and-Irrigation-Controller-Node-Red https://github.com/samuk/IoT-Greenhouse-Temperature-and-Irri... I'd be pleasantly surprised if DJI had done anything open source, Ardupilot is pretty capable of course. I really want to automate the time consuming labour parts of horticulture, for me that's mostly weeding and to a lesser extent harvesting.

lorenzohess 7mo ago

Looks great for a prototype. Has any modeling, simulation, or analysis been done of its off-road performance, i.e. mobility, GO/NOGO, motive efficiency, maneuverability on deformable terrain? This is critical for agricultural applications. Has any stress analysis been done on the frame? Looks to me like it could use a couple more triangles to reinforce those rectangles. Have you designed a skid-steering controller for it? Off-road skid steering can be quite variable obviously depending on terrain properties.

Sabrees 7mo ago
Rosys (a middleware layer https://github.com/zauberzeug/rosys https://github.com/zauberzeug/rosys) has rosys.driving.Odometer and rosys.driving.Steerer it's essentially a differential drive kinematic model. Hoping RTK dual-F9P moving-base setup (M4 in the roadmap) largely sidesteps the worst of this — NAV-RELPOSNED gives us a real heading vector independent of wheel odometry, and the robot_localisation EKF can weight RTK heavily and odometry lightly when GNSS quality is good.
Sabrees 7mo ago
The current simulation is underdeveloped but can be found here https://github.com/samuk/caatingarobotics/tree/jazzy/src/agro_robot_sim https://github.com/samuk/caatingarobotics/tree/jazzy/src/agr... The frame will almost certainly need more triangles

defrost 7mo ago

Australia's been working with various types of robotics in agriculture since 1980 at least [1], these days, for open field work there are several families of solution in developmental progress. One leading contender is SwarmFarm Robotics, based out of Queensland. * https://advance.qld.gov.au/innovation-in-queensland/innovation-stories/agtech-pioneer-swarmfarm-robotics-transforms-farming-with-autonomous-solutions https://advance.qld.gov.au/innovation-in-queensland/innovati... * https://www.swarmfarm.com/ https://www.swarmfarm.com/ For interest, here's a recent opinion / demonstration from an unassociated Australian farmer considering a purchase. The farm is Tom’s Brook, a grain farm located in Esperance in Western Australia. It’s a family operated business growing a mixture of Wheat, Barley and Canola on 4500 hectares (11 200 Acres). Sizewise is pretty much bang on the average W.Australian grain acerage. Seeing a Swarm Bot in Action (20 min) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM The unit pair in action here, autonomous tractor pulling intelligent boom spray, has had 10,000 acres of operation prior to this customer demonstration. Unloaded weight ~ 3.5 metric tonne, loaded approx 5 tonne. Runs at about 13 hectares per hour, max speed 10 km/hour. Advantages of "intelligence" during operation are reduced spray usage (basic green on dirt detection, and green shape on mixed green patterns) and weather patience (happy to sit idle until wind and humidity are optimal) 70 odd Comments include feedback from other farmers already using such agribots, eg: Just rolled over 12,000 hrs on our swarmbot. 4 years, 3000hr a year, doesn't get into the shed much. The first 12 minutes are Vendor + Farmer discussing bot in action, remaining eight minutes is farmer and hands discussing pros and cons. -- [1] Robot Sheep Shearing (1985) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZAh2zv7TMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZAh2zv7TMM

gaudystead 7mo ago

I'm not sure how much more work is currently being done on a project I'd heard about in the past, but you might be interested in seeing if you can collaborate/learn from Open Source Ecology: https://www.opensourceecology.org/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/

culi 7mo ago
Wow nice to see the website has been updated in 2025. I followed it for years but it seemed to not get much updates. Folks might also be interested in the Precious Plastic community which has a global network of "microfactories" built around a set of open-source machines made for recycling and reusing plastics https://www.preciousplastic.com/ https://www.preciousplastic.com/ https://community.preciousplastic.com/map https://community.preciousplastic.com/map Also as far as fundamental machines go, this 2d printer is expected to come out later this year https://www.opentools.studio/ https://www.opentools.studio/

umairnadeem123 7mo ago

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vb7132 7mo ago

Your discord link doesn't seem to work. One basic question: As a hardware noob, where do I start? Maybe having a minimal getting started guide could really help. Nevertheless, the initiative looks cool!

adrian_b 7mo ago

I wonder how good is the cooling of the stacked "robot brain". It would be nice to see some temperatures in relevant points, when the computer is stress tested in the closed waterproof case and a hot ambient. The Cortex-A55 based CPU has low power consumption, but it is not negligible and without a heatsink it may overheat and throttle. Moreover, in a closed box, one may need some means to transfer the heat from the stacked electronics to the aluminum walls of the box. Finding suitable means may be more complex for this design, because of the curious choice of using 2 weak SBCs instead of 1 good SBC, so there are 2 sets of CPU + memories that must be cooled. From the provided pictures, I cannot see how the electronics would be cooled well enough, especially when working outdoors during a hot day.