[chrisb]

https://spring-agriculture.com/

Autonomous robotics for sustainable agriculture. Based in the south of the UK. Prototypes of an autonomous mechanical farm-scale weeding robot currently beginning real-world testing. Still a huge amount of work to do though.

Hardware and software developed fairly much from scratch, not using ROS (for not entirely crazy reasons...); everything written in Rust which I find well suited to this application area.

The robot is built using off-the-shelf components and 3d-printed custom parts, so build cost is surprisingly low, and iterations are fast (well, for hardware dev).

On robot compute is a couple of Raspberry Pi 5s.

Currently using the RPi AI Kit for image recognition, ie Hailo 8[L] accelerators.

Not currently using any advanced robotics VLA-type AI models, but soon looking to experiment with some of it, initially in simulation.

Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to talk :) Contact details in my HN profile, and on our website.

[AussieCoder]

I invested in Small Robots Co (https://smallrobotco.com/) who were doing something similar. They had a good product, good brand, raised some funding, and were starting to get traction, with robots in trials on a number of farms, but at the end of the day they ran out of funding before they reached default-alive.

It's a tough space - convincing farmers to give it a go and running trials takes time and the UK isn't a very startup-friendly environment - investors are too often looking for a quick return.

This is such an important area - it's only going to become more critical to be able to grow more food whilst using less fertiliser and weed killer - so I wish you the very best of luck!

[chrisb]

Nice to meet an SRC investor :)

Yes, it was all very sad the way SRC ended.

Coincidentally, we're based fairly close to where they operated. We are in touch with some of the people that used to be involved with SRC, and have been able to learn from some of their experiences. There is agreement that the UK can be difficult for this kind of startup, but also about the importance of the product area.

[worik]

Very interesting

I have seen a few of these, but only one (about a decade ago) that used legs not wheels

Wouldn't it be better if the robot walked rather than rolled?

You may be able to illuminate this for me...

[chrisb]

Before we started building we considered many different designs, including legs. However, it introduces significant extra mechanical and control complexity, with more complex failure modes - e.g. one leg gets stuck in the mud; it also would be more expensive to build.

So we decided to stick with wheels, at least for this product iteration!

[pistachiosPower]

Very Cool!! I'm pretty new to the robotics world, why are you avoiding ROS?

[chrisb]

My knowledge of ROS is a couple of years out of date, but primarily that reproducible testing and simulation, with precise time/clock management, which is essential for a reliable product, was very difficult in ROS.

I also felt the ROS build system more convoluted than necessary; and seemed rather brittle - it was too easy to break it with OS or other updates.

We found that many off-the-shelf ROS nodes didn't do quite what we wanted, and ended up spending much more time than expected rewriting code that we expected we wouldn't need to. It is quicker, and we end up with less & more maintainable code, by writing it ourselves.

I expect this could have been resolved, but when testing ROS we also ended up using more compute resources on-robot than we expected.

Using our own system allows us to build exactly what we require, which has become more important as our system gets larger and more complex; and means integrations into other systems (including testing) are easier.

[pistachiosPower]

You are already the second case in two weeks that have abandoned ROS for industrial purpose(and not university), preferring to build something of their own. I agree that the build system is more complicated than it should be,but I was unaware of the problems related to the resources used by the nodes.

Your comment gave me a lot to think about, thank you.