[Qworg]

As someone who lived and worked on farms, I agree that they're not practical right now. That said, I'll take on some of your other points.

"there are no food crops that are economical to grow inside a greenhouse" - there are many organic lettuce/greens growers that put lie to this statement.

I don't like the gantry system, mostly because what you stated. Also because it is _extremely_ expensive vs. other methods. If you're doing that, you might as well just put it on wheels and have it drive around.

The radial system can still run more robots - I don't see any restrictions past weight on the arm. It is the equivalent of a circle sprayer, just with robots instead of water.

As for cheap vision/LIDAR, it is most certainly not driven by games. The big Deere tractors are moving away from LIDAR towards sets of stereo cameras because the algorithms are getting better and the cameras are much cheaper and more robust than LIDAR.

I see this device fitting a niche in "black greenhouses" where there aren't any humans involved at all. Totally recycled, totally hermetically sealed environments, like a clean room for plants.

[keenerd]

Regarding greenhouses, any example you cite I can say is way out of economical norms ;-) But the only way to make organic work (without throwing away half the produce or drowning the field in the few allowable chemicals) is to either do it indoors or in a part of the world where the pests don't exist yet. But that is neither here nor there.

How do you get the extra robots installed on the radial systems? With gantry and wheel based systems, you plop them down at one end of the field and then they re-arrange themselves.

I was specifically thinking the advances in time-of-flight LIDAR that seem to be for short range (several feet) gesture recognition. Not for object avoidance (Deere's use case) but on the wrist of a manipulator, where you don't always have the space for a stereo-optical setup.

One day hermetic greenhouses might make sense. Until then it will be cheaper and (arguably) less impactful to grow the veg someplace with reasonable weather and pests and ship it instead.

[Qworg]

I'm thinking each individual boom arm can carry multiple robots. So you can service the entire radius faster.

As for robots with wheels, I was thinking about doing away with the gantries all together. Just let the robots move through the area themselves.

I understand better your gesture recognition method. It might make RSIs go away if the robot picked what the human pointed at. =)

And, yes, except in very few cases, greenhouses don't make sense. Someday...