Oh hey, this is my project! Great to see it show up here. This post is a bit old. I’m currently working on two big video updates (and associated blog posts), but there is a newer update from March of this year here:
The answer is that right now it doesn’t do any farming. To do farming we need to develop tools. Tools are highly specific to the farming process used, and our machine is unlike a tractor or a human hand as it has less power than a tractor, more power than a human, and doesn’t get bored or require any marginal input costs like human labor does. This means existing tools aren’t exactly right and it’s going to take a bit of work to get that sorted.
Because tools are such a complex part of the system, our plan is to finalize and release our autonomous rover without any tools to early adopters, and then work with the community to experiment and design tools together. Remember that this is an open source research project and we encourage and will assist anyone in going in to production on their own machines, so early adopters designing tools will ensure they have a complete system they can manufacture that works for their farming context.
The end goal is a system which can help in every step of the farming process in a regenerative organic farming system. This includes clearing the rows of any cover crop, planting seeds and starts, thinning seedlings and pulling weeds, dealing with pests, harvesting, and resetting for a new rotation.
It’s a lot of work as I’m doing most of the design, engineering, and fabrication work myself as well as all video production and blog work, but as I’ve mentioned I’m finalizing two new videos and one of the new videos is a new easier to produce format. I got a little too in to fancy video production with four locations and multiple angles on one of the videos and realized I need to dial it back and produce simpler more frequent videos.
You’re welcome to follow me on mastodon where I post photos of some of the latest work, as well as personal stuff. Here’s a picture of the brand new vehicle we have developed that is our production intent system, as well as new electronics which have just finished production and are in transit to us now. Thanks so much for taking a look!
A suggestion for something it could do: Detect mold and/or pests
For example, hemp is a crop that is fairly easy to plant and fairly easy to harvest (albeit much more labor-intensive to trim and make into a final product), but it's relatively hard and time-intensive to look for mold or aphids and mites, especially as its get closer to harvest. The nice thing about this goal is the tools needed are just cameras and software on top of your existing platform. (These are my opinions as someone who has farmed hemp commercially, albeit only for 2 years on 6 acres).
"I got a little too in to fancy video production with four locations and multiple angles on one of the videos and realized I need to dial it back and produce simpler more frequent videos."
Well yes, the main thing I am expecting when I see a video about a robot/rover - is simply to see it in action. In the 9 minutes video it is shown to be moving only some seconds, which I totally missed upon skimming through it, which left me disappointed.
So if it really can do GPS pathing, I want to see that, so why not show it? Probably best in a speedrun, where it goes up and down the field.
All the technical details are interesting, but probably are better shown after it is shown what it can do. Basically all the robot movies are following that pattern and it makes kind of sense. Because you likely want to attract people who want to use it and not mainly people who want to tinker with it for the sake of tinkering.
"Tools are highly specific to the farming process used"
Seeding and weeding (in early stage) are quite general problems (mostly) independent from the plant and especially autonomous weeding (to not have to use pesticides) could be really useful. You are probably aware of https://farm.bot? They are doing it stationary, but maybe the same tools with modifications could be applied to your rovers?
Ah so what’s happening here is that our first video was entirely drone shots of the robot operating autonomously, and this video was our second video with a focus on the technical system design. Overall we’ve released three videos and two show it in autonomous operation. Just not this one!
The new video that has more complex production is an 18 minute narrative video sharing the full details of our intent as well as a story which has been important for me to share for a long time. To keep it engaging I decided to shoot in a few different locations at the farm and change camera angles, but I learned that it’s just too much to attempt to do that. So future videos will be me standing in one spot reading an update while I play b-roll of whatever we’re discussing on screen.
Weeding tools are going to be more complex and rely on computer vision, which requires building a data set and a lot of complex mechanics, so we want to release the system to early adopters before that. Plenty of people are interested in this, and anyone who wants to wait till we have tools is welcome to do so. It’s just going to take a while because we’re not venture funded, we’re a little open source research project.
Here’s a video of autonomous operation. Also in my first link in the comment you’re replying to there’s a video showing complex multi-path following capability. Cheers!
Thanks for the clarification and I just now see that indeed also in this video the rover is moving in the video in the beginning. But not very long and I assume many people are like me lazily skimming through things half distracted - and missing the important parts and just leave - so I still would advice to start a video with some more action. Not necessarily TikTok style (for me that would be off putting), but still more focus on the rover in action. (Like a speedrun)
"So future videos will be me standing in one spot reading an update while I play b-roll of whatever we’re discussing on screen."
That sounds solid enough. I am also in the process of working up the presentation of a software open source project - and I totally get lost in fancy details, while forgetting the essentials.
As an recently ex small regenerative farmer, seeding is a well understood process - tools like the Jang or four-row seeder make it fast and easy. What really peeved me was the repetitive, uncreative aspects, primarily the cultivation - I can't think of many less exciting things than walking up and down beds of crops too small to have a closed canopy dragging a cultivation hoe as close to the rows as feasible. Its one thing when the plants are big enough for some variation; but by then theyve shaded out the weeds and its not needed.
I would love a tool like this, even if it required setting up some sort of track, which could run a standard seeder on a precise path and then habitually run a standard cultivating hoe within a quarterinch of the rows it seeded without me thinking about it. I could never rig up something suitable on a BCS toolbar, its bed clearance wasnt enough. Being able to not interact with a crop beyond irrigation maintenace, filling seed hoppers, and harvesting/bed flipping would be amazing.
This is very interesting. I'm from Iowa, and several extended family members are traditional crop farmers (soybeans/corn). It seems that Acorn is geared towards small-scale organic/sustainable farms, but if there's a way to apply lightweight, capital-efficient robots to large-scale crop farming, you know, farmers are pragmatic, and they'd adopt readily. There are three big problems:
1. Weeds. My uncle's old cultivator sits rusting in his machine shed because he just sprays herbicides these days and running a mechanical cultivator is slow, weather-dependent, and hard to scale to hundreds/thousands of acres across several fields with different locations. Mounting a mechanical cultivator between the wheels on either side or devising some other system of weeding would greatly reduce the amount of spraying, and of course who cares if Acorn is slow? Set it and forget it, have it go faster when no weeds are detected, focus on where the weeds and wet patches are. Farmers don't like spraying herbicides, but they do it because it's legal and it's the only way to scale to current acreage.
2. Fertilizer. So much fertilizer is wasted and turns to runoff. Applying fertilizer precisely would be a huge boon to the Mississippi and the Gulf.
3. Irrigation. Some farmers in Wisconsin irrigate, but most in Iowa don't. Some parts of a field are wet, some are dry, but the air is usually humid. Using condensate to irrigate crop roots directly in dry areas of a field could prevent a ton of loss for farmers.
The solar panel and supercapacitor architecture is interesting, but it'd be great to see what could be done with some batteries (an array of ebike batteries?) that could be charged by the panels. With the assembly, allowing adjustment in the width would be useful to accommodate different row sizes, height clearance to accommodate different crops, and then mountpoints between the wheels on either side for different equipment/attachments. I'd think some triangle braces from the wheels to the side centers may be necessary.
It'd be great to see how well Acorn could deal with different grades and mud. There's increasing evidence that heavy tractors have a long-term detriment to fields due to soil compaction, so having lightweight robots would be very useful.
Keep it up. I'm hoping this project is something a novice grower could use to farm a few acres more easily. Would love to see more people turn extra acreage into sustainable farming.
Oh sure. It’s pretty sturdy! It can struggle to carry very heavy loads up hills but that could be solved by an auxiliary battery or by carrying smaller loads. The biggest thing we need to do right now is get the system in to more people’s hands so everyone can experiment on a common platform.
Looks interesting, but the article has no details on what it currently does. Only vague ideas of what it will do, eventually.
>We are often asked: what does our robot do? At this time Acorn is still under development. In the future it will be equipped with a smart vision system and robotic tools that will be able to plant seeds, destroy weeds, monitor plant health, and much more.
But so far all it looks to be is a solar powered buggy. Would love to revisit this when they make it actually do something.
Claiming it's a "precision robot" before claiming it does anything is...a choice.
It’s a good question and I incorporated my answer in to a top level comment here. Short answer: it’s a new type of vehicle so existing tools aren’t exactly right. We’re going to release the first vehicle to early adopters with no tools and then work with the community to design appropriate tools for it. This is important because every farm is different and so many people will have good ideas. We don’t want to gatekeep the design while we work on tools.
I will say that while it doesn’t do farming yet, that is the point of the system. And currently it autonomously controls 8 motors to follow precision GPS paths based on data from a central server and database system with a web page for control. It’s definitely a robot with some degree of precision!
Hah might need tougher tires. In my experience with my other rover robot dogs get real curious and run up close and bark but they usually don’t want to actually touch it because they’re too unsure of it.
Good you went with wheels instead of some kinda Boston dynamics deal, anything that looks like it has an Achilles seems to draw most of the attention of Kelpies and collies and other herding breeds. I knew one orchard roaming kelpie that would stare at the apple ladder foot for as long as it took until it moved so that it could bite the aluminium to herd it along.
It's an all-terrain solar powered buggy with smart behavior around faults, GPS pathing, and four-wheel steering. Calling it a 'rover' for the time being is fair.
Yeah, but in the video on the website, it is not actually driving, nor have I found a video of it driving somewhere upon a second look.
But it is supposed to be only driving when the sun is shining, so maybe we have to wait till spring/summer?
I mean seriously? It surely is more efficient, to not waste solar energy by storing the energy in capacitors and not in batteries, but that means, it will stop whatever it is doing when a cloud comes and it will stay out and not make it to the shed again, when the sun does not come back.
I would rather have the solar panels somewhere else, or those on top of the rover just as a bonus and use batteries and focus on it to do useful things first.
edit: ok it is driving in the video at 8:25 for a few seconds
The solar is an experiment to see if we can build a system that reduces waste. Farms already rely on sun to operate and we want to see if we can build a farming system that does the same. This reduces waste as our super caps last a million charge cycles while lithium batteries only last a few thousand.
There are two huge potential benefits from using robots in ag fields that immediately come to mind:
1) Precision weeding. The best option I've seen so far is using an IR laser and machine-learning based weed-recognition software to weed. Here's one example:
> "The Autonomous Weeder can eliminate more than 100,000 weeds per hour and weed 15 to 20 acres of crops in one day — for comparison, Myers said a laborer can weed about one acre of his onions per day."
The other has to do with precise fertilizer application. Right now, it's cheaper labor-wise to just dump fertilizer on the entire field, where a good fraction of it is lost due to things like runoff or denitrification. A robot could instead deliver aliquots of fertilizer right to the base of each plant, and could possibly even monitor plants individually for deficiencies. This could vastly reduce fertilizer demand in the optimal situation. This is also under current development:
The other benefit is not requiring monocultures. The robot could deal with individual plants. Imagine having non-crop nitrogen fixers interleaved within a normal crop. It might not work in practice, but these are the sorts of things that start to be possible.
Dang that's awesome. I wonder if something like that laser robot is the answer to our over reliance on herbicides and growing resistance to herbicides?
Residue free, low effort weed control. The future is here
Nice project indeed, been following it for some time. I grew up on a farm, have agricultural and IT degrees and also worked in automation in farming, factories, cities and warehouses.
This project focusses on a technological solution to societal, economical and agronomical problems. You could try to make a cheap robot that does traditional farming like tillage, fertilizer and pesticide spraying, irrigation on a monoculture. Or you could design your farm with permaculture and foodforest principles which makes it like a self sustaining ecosystem that reduces a resource usage of water, labour, nutrients, pest control etc. Society leads people into bullshit desk jobs where they have to spend their free time in the gym to not become morbidly obese. I think society could benefit if people could enjoy at least part time doing manual labour growing food instead.
What kind of per-acre yield do you get with the methods you described above? Can they feed our population? Do the same methods work in coastal California and Indiana?
Well this does go back to traditional high yield techniques like terra preta which besides making superfertile soil has the added benefit of being a carbon capture and soil preservation solution or the three sisters system where you get yields from three crops on one field and even get nitrogen capture from legumes. What does high yield mean in the short term when you are destroying your most valuable resource. Even if you have high yield one dimension, how efficient is this when you have multiple inputs and outputs and you end up in a pareto efficient situation. The highest yielding farms do not necessarily have the best scale efficiency. Permaculture and food forest systems can have very high yields if designed correctly. California is losing thousands of acres of land to salinization because of bad irrigation practices. Permaculture means to improve and protect to soil and increase water retention with the help of carbon content in the soil. I'm not from the US so I would'nt know about Indiana.
There was a paper recently showing that small scale allotments have higher yield then conventional farming. The suggesting is that it was the high labour approach, including high crop diversity that increased the yield. It's this sort of thing that robots can do: run large farms like small scale allotments, with all the environmental benefits that would bring.
My parents had a highly computerized feeding system on our farm. In the summers I worked student jobs in highly technological green houses picking tomatoes and pig slaughter houses besides the work on the farm. I've grown some form of scepticism from experience of the high degree of automation in food production systems from a consumer or operator side. Do mind I work in automation but it needs to bring more value than just playing with toys. Permaculture systems are designed to reduce or optimize usage of all resources also labor. You set up an ecosystem where pests are kept under controle by other organisms instead of relying chemical or mechanical controls. This is even more puritanical than classic organic farming where you rely on natural pesticides. I am from Belgium where we have the belgium blue white cow which is very highly yielding in meat because of a genetic mutation but you are very dependent on vets for giving birth via caesarians because of the high degree of muscularity. There is a trend towards other races like limousin for meat production. In biological systems theory of constraint applies very much were you are very dependent on limiting factors like micronutrients, vitamins or in this case microchips. Humans and hamsters are both the only animals that can't produce vitamin C which makes fresh fruit a limiting factor for us or we get scurvy. The reliance on natural gas for nitrogen fertilizer via the born haber proces is already a handicap in a polarizing world. Imagine being reliant for operation of your food production system on a geopolitical hotbed like Taiwanese computerchips. I do think technology can also help with the design of robust food systems. I know the food forest institute in Belgium has a course on using drones for surveyance.
Are you able to recommend some resources to get started with permaculture. I'm also in 'tech' but I've recently been developing an interest in 'living off the land' and would like to have my feet in both areas going into the future.
I learned about permaculture from books in my native language (eg Louis De jager from food forest institute in Belgium). I'm no expert though. I did find docu like "The Biggest Little Farm" very inspirational.
Fantastic work Taylor! A few years ago I was hoping someone would create something like this. Glad to see it becoming a reality!!
Taylor, I was just wondering-- Is it feasible to use lasers for killing weeds while retaining relatively light weight robot? (Wasn't sure if this would require prohibitively heavy batteries)
Here are some other interesting farm robots--
- Six farm robot models-- created by folks at the University of Sydney, Australia
Thank you! I’ve not done the calculations but our solar system is 800 watts continuous output in full sun. We have supercapacitors that can deliver several kilowatts in short bursts. I’d suspect that it’s perfectly possible to run a suitably powerful laser off of that. I’ve got a laser cutter at home that draws 40 watts of power and cuts through heavy denim fabric, so that would definitely kill a weed! I suppose this means we could continuously run ten such lasers while also leaving overhead for the drive system and compute.
It’s 10 watts optical power, 40 watts electrical power. This is the laser and it works great for cutting fabric, though thick white fabric is most difficult to cut and I have to move it pretty slowly.
I currently move a Salatin-style chicken tractor 12 feet every day, and I could totally see turning this thing into a chicken tractor that moves itself. Bonus points if it could spot sick or injured birds, or identify a problem bird that attacks the other chickens, etc. Or even predator detection/deterrence if a fox or raccoon starts trying to dig under the edge to get inside to the chickens.
That's a great application. Robot could even move from tractor to tractor to move multiple of them down the field.
When you're manually moving the tractor, do the birds ever get stuck/pinched under the edges? Seeing videos of them being moved, it seems like it might be easy to have happen if the chicken got lazy.
To me, it seems that having the panels on the bot is not an efficient design.
Why lug those huge heavy panels everywhere?
A modular design, where panels are installed on the farm, and the heart of the machine is small, compact and has different chassis to suit different farming requirements, is a better way to go forward.
The solar panels charge a swappable battery and the farmer can switch batteries every two days or so.
Currently, the width of the bot is an issue. Its too big. You want small bots that can go between plants close together and do their magic.
Which will be heavier, the batteries, or the panels?
I'm sure there's a concern that the panels are undersized, especially when it's working in mud and trying to dig holes on a cloudy day.
What is the ideal row spacing in your opinion? Row spacing is a factor of the size of the equipment (tractor and various devices they pull), and a size of the plants.
He is using 8 100W panels. You could fit a decent Li-Ion battery in place of that weight.
Row spacing requirements vary greatly between different types of farms.
For example, the current configuration is not suitable for corn or maize once they grow fully.
My ideal case is to have a box that is pluggable to different chassis, that can be used at different stages of farming and at different types of farms.
Thanks for the calculation! Our biggest motivation for doing pure solar power is to reduce environmental waste from batteries wearing out. (The super capacitors last a million charge cycles)
It makes sense to me that a single person can do farming by hand with about the same power available as our robot. There’s no heavy tillage in regenerative organic so the power requirements are much lower.
Also the nice thing about the solar power is that the robot is just always ready to go. No charging, no battery swapping. No need to source electricity from anywhere. All you need is a modest amount of sunlight and you’re good to go. Honestly when we started the project I wanted to do batteries, and Daniel insisted we do solar and supercaps. After building it and using it I’ve fallen in love with the system. It’s so nice! The trick is to co-develop a farming system and the robot to get the farming done within this power envelope. We believe it’s likely possible. We can always slap a battery on it if needed. And I do enough software development at night I do have a battery for testing. But I’d prefer that be used for special cases rather than every day use.
Can't imagine how could you make harvester this small.
I think more helpful would be precision monitoring of fields with drones and then maybe even taking care of small weeds.
For every other process, you need big machinery anyway.
Would be more productive to force big manufactures to open-sourcing their stuff.
> Would be more productive to force big manufactures to open-sourcing their stuff.
Given that current manufacturers' agtech tends to be incredibly locked down devices, just about anything starting as open source seems to be a much better use of time than trying to force John Deere, et al to open source their devices.
My general philosophy is that if a human can do it then a robot the size of a car can do it. The nice thing about autonomy is that if it is slow or requires frequent drop off trips this doesn’t really affect anyone. As far as forcing manufacturers to open source stuff, I guess I’m all for it but intention matters here. Our system is designed specifically so anyone can fabricate them. It’s designed to be easy to make in a small shop. You’re not going to get that same intention by forcing someone to open source their design.
Generally the designers seem to be making some good decisions, such as cheap parts, identical corner pieces, etc…
There are interesting developments around using precision targeted spraying at individual weeds that this robot would be good at. The chemical volume and hence weight would be low, so you don’t need a big diesel tractor!
Similarly, a small robot like this could make daily passes over a field, killing weeds when they’re still tiny. Again, this reduces the power and weight requirements.
this is an upbeat assessment but as someone whos repaired farm equipment and worked on a 40 acre farm, hard no.
taylor needs immediate hands on and real world farm work experience to try and not only solve a problem but figure out what farms need. most of their efforts feel out of touch...in my personal opinion theyve consumed too much of the marketing of farming.
cheap open source implementations are a big plus, but theres a reason we dont use bicycle tires on tractors or equipment. light weight can also be a huge problem after a rainy season or during a storm. oklahoma farms get 50mph gusts and texas farms need to operate +35c. can we survive a lightning strike? if we get lost can we alert other farm traffic were around? can we get accidentally sprayed by a chemical or forgotten somewhere? can we detect a person?
taylors robot needs to run on numerous fuels, including diesel or kerosene, to serve small farmers globally. it needs to be a lot more hands on, easy to transport and quick to get visual information from in english and especially spanish.
Edit: so ive given it a little more thought and in picking season might be a good candidate!! can we use Taylors robot to detect fatigue or heat stroke? lightning strike detector? live dopplar? respond to accidents, communicate first aid? deliver food and water, or confirm a crop for picking? in short i think taylors offerings a lot more on the human side of farming, like a digital foreman :)
Our goal is to take a community oriented approach to farming automation. We’re going to put this vehicle in the hands of people all over the world and together we’ll work on solutions to the various problems you’ve discussed. It does sit outside in hard rain storms all season long, but you’re right that wind could be an issue in some places.
I should point out that we’re intending to target regenerative organic farming systems, which are often tended by humans with hand tools or small 15 horsepower two wheeled tractors (like a BCS). At that scale, our one horsepower solar powered system can likely be made to work. But we don’t have to solve every problem ourselves. We’re trying to get this in other peoples hands and the design will evolve as we get feedback from real world farmers and experimenters.
Edit: This is the type of farming process we’re targeting. Hopefully that makes it clearer why we believe in our approach:
https://youtu.be/1BH0NkN6zHs
this projects goals are far more sustainable than i assumed, so as an old man im a bit embarrassed at my post. imo its likely an inevitability in scope given climate change that this robot becomes a regular part of harvest. at this scale the tractors allowed to be slower, like a second gen mahindra tiller (or slower) but its also allowed to do a lot more.
dont discount the wind though! many farms see a lot. having onboard diagnostics like a printer does might be nice too...quick things like spot weld repairs?
Thank you and it’s all good! I appreciate your opinions here and it’s good to challenge our assumptions. I’m glad they stand up to your scrutiny! That means a lot to me.
Yeah we may need to add gaps to the solar panels so there’s less surface for wind to grab, and we’ll have to make sure they’re secured nice and tight! I hope we get some customers in windy areas to test and give us feedback too. It’s all about community involvement here.
Diagnostics would be great and we do have some of that rolled in to the software now. I’m sure there’s room for more. We are MIG welding the new frames and they should be quick enough to do in the field if needed!
Yep that’s one of the nice things about this system. It can go out and do the same tasks quickly on a regular basis without wasting a persons time. So we can find new approaches to weed management that take less power and just happen more frequently.
Side note, for some reason my brain is disproportionately fascinated reading ag tech discussions or generally hearing farmers talk shop vs many other subjects that I'm much more invested in.
Weed lasers would be a welcomed implement. In my county they estimate a large percentage of the viable agricultural output is lost due to foreign and domestic invasive plants overtaking grazing and cultivated land. You have to work really hard to feel like you are breaking even if you are not willing to nuke with 2-4D every spring and fall.
Some plants (even native/noninvasives. looking at you Lupine…) cause serious harm directly to livestock, or reduce the carry ability of the pastures (mustards, St. John’s wort) to get livestock to late fall without eating the hay you cut in the summer that might have a cluster of hoary alyssum which will make your horses sick. Some, you may just have to make your peace with (Canadian thistle).
'nother uncooperative web site demanding that I upgrade my browser (I can't -- it's running on an EOL Chromebook Pixel). I just checked, I still can view Apple.com in all it's glory. Now tell me with a straight face that your web site needs to be more dynamic, more immersive, more glorious than Apple.com .
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/march-2022-update-simu...
A common question is “okay but what does it do?”
The answer is that right now it doesn’t do any farming. To do farming we need to develop tools. Tools are highly specific to the farming process used, and our machine is unlike a tractor or a human hand as it has less power than a tractor, more power than a human, and doesn’t get bored or require any marginal input costs like human labor does. This means existing tools aren’t exactly right and it’s going to take a bit of work to get that sorted.
Because tools are such a complex part of the system, our plan is to finalize and release our autonomous rover without any tools to early adopters, and then work with the community to experiment and design tools together. Remember that this is an open source research project and we encourage and will assist anyone in going in to production on their own machines, so early adopters designing tools will ensure they have a complete system they can manufacture that works for their farming context.
The end goal is a system which can help in every step of the farming process in a regenerative organic farming system. This includes clearing the rows of any cover crop, planting seeds and starts, thinning seedlings and pulling weeds, dealing with pests, harvesting, and resetting for a new rotation.
It’s a lot of work as I’m doing most of the design, engineering, and fabrication work myself as well as all video production and blog work, but as I’ve mentioned I’m finalizing two new videos and one of the new videos is a new easier to produce format. I got a little too in to fancy video production with four locations and multiple angles on one of the videos and realized I need to dial it back and produce simpler more frequent videos.
You’re welcome to follow me on mastodon where I post photos of some of the latest work, as well as personal stuff. Here’s a picture of the brand new vehicle we have developed that is our production intent system, as well as new electronics which have just finished production and are in transit to us now. Thanks so much for taking a look!
https://queer.party/@tlalexander/109570577090460530
https://queer.party/@tlalexander/109488692996964147