[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...