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by samatman 2103 days ago
I've thought about a similar platform, but as an agricultural robot for smallholding.

If you have a quarter acre, you can have a nice garden, and it's kind of labor intensive but hopefully enjoyable, and you can get some nice food out of it.

With five to ten acres, food security is in reach, and some left over for market. But it's really rather a lot of work, and the tools farmers use to make that work easy are massively oversized for the job, and require you to lay out the land according to the logic of a much larger farm.

A pig-sized arachnid robot, with a vision module and a few replaceable tools for 'mandibles', a replaceable lithium pack for an abdomen: that could bring the amount of work back down to a part-time job.

This is a company, not a project. But backed with open-source software so that the machine learning and supplemental tools can be improved by users, I think it could be quite a successful one, and make the world more robust and anti-fragile.

1 comments

This would require a very good image recognition software! Anyway yeah I do agree that agricultural robots are quite interesting and profitable at least in the near future.
I would have thought that level of image recognition was already here, even close to being packaged up in Python packages. You think we're not there yet?

With half decent radios, the brains of the bot could be stashed back at HQ, which would really improve the amount of computation available.

Very honestly, I’ve started looking at CV since I’ve integrated the robotic arm in my model (a couple of days ago :)). I‘m actually searching paper/project on it - My next step is the “open a door” task
Brains are really not the limiting factor, and yeah, the raw materials for doing this kind of recognition are pretty mature. You'd want some kind of server in any case, but I bet the CV could feasibly be done onboard.

The physical manipulation part would take some work for sure, and the robot itself would be fairly expensive to make, but it's all pretty achievable. You need it to do more than a BobCat while costing less.

It's not "Uber for $sector" but it can be done.