| On level ground unloaded the vehicle draws about 60 watts moving at a fast walking pace. Well the old vehicle with larger tires did. Those large wheels added a lot of cost so we moved to some smaller wheels, which do seem to use more energy, maybe 100 watts on level ground. For weeding, the robot is heavy enough that if you were using a drag tool you wouldn't need extra weight. We might use a robot arm for weeding, not sure. However one of the tricks in regenerative organic is to prepare your soil in such a way as to avoid the need for much weeding during the crop growth cycle. When I say "fertilizer is not used" I mean industrially-derived chemical fertilizer is not used. We would still need to spread compost and manure, which can be heavy! That would be one of the more energy intensive tasks. Who knows, maybe we will find we need a battery for that task. This would be easy to add. I think many tasks will not require a battery. It sounds like you're interested in the farming process. Here is a quick overview of regenerative organic farming systems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct3CL22RpTg And this is a really nice detailed lecture series on a regenerative organic farming system:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCeA6DzL9P4uRadXW0_hj... In the second link, they use a two wheeled walk behind tractor that is I think 18 horsepower. We will have 1 to 1.5 horsepower effectively, so we will have to re-think some of the tools, but you can see how moving slower with no driver could get us in the ballpark. Remember, farming can be accomplished by a single human with basic hand tools, and our robot has more power available to it than a single human can output continuously. Of course, humans are a lot smarter which certainly helps, but you can begin to see my reasoning for why I believe our approach is reasonable. Also watering is usually done with impact sprinklers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_sprinkler Cheers! |
I will buy a small farm this year (if I'm lucky) and I do believe your general approach is very interesting.
Let see how it continues.
Regarding sprinkler etc. I saw a bigger drown spraying stuff. If the autonomy is very reliable you could refill it regularly.
Sprinkler I'm really not convinced but we don't have a lot of sprinklers in field in Germany.
Might be a little bit waist full from a water perspective