Plantbot

We want to develop open-source farm roboter(s) for small to medium sized bio-dynamically cultivated farms, to minimize labor for all the tasty and sustainable farming products that we call 'Bio-Gemüse'.

Background: Most of farming robotic available today is made for very specific use cases only, thus, supporting monoculture. Additionaly the machinery is often heavy duty leading to soil compaction. Mixed culture farming is not only much more sustainable for the whole ecosystem but is also, if applied correctly, much more efficient in land usage, but , yeah, it demands a lot of work by hand.

Inspired by: https://farmbot.io/

A small group of people had a kick-off meeting @23 in B. Further meetings will be organized in B. via this mailing list: https://lists.gesindel.org/mailman/listinfo/stattgarten

* modular: the way how the robot moves in the farm (rails, tires, spikes, gallows) should be independent from the way the robot uses different tools * easy to maintain * the robot should be producible with the common machinery available in makerspaces/fab-labs (laser cutter, milling machine, 3d-printer,…)

to be defined: * farm size * maximum pressure the robot should put on the soil * maximum lane size * minimum working radius when tooling and not moving

We might start with a 7bot (http://www.7bot.cc/download) on a one-axis track.

The uArm may be moved on a small vehicle later, depending on the needed working radius and under consideration of stability: * directly * horizontally movable on a bar * or even horizontally movable on a rotating bar

the farmbot.io guys have developed a convincing tool chain: * the cad model of the universal tool mount: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/6626b842adca229e69544ad1/w/89ac2637f82d915f22c2bcd0/e/187952d103a8a9b48260ea74 * and cad models of a bunch of tools: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/6626b842adca229e69544ad1/w/89ac2637f82d915f22c2bcd0/e/02039dd3fc6d108f0bebf093

http://identify.plantnet-project.org/