Convertible manipulator/sheer
A manipulator with four or six ‘fingers’ positioned symmetrically around a central axis might also serve as a sheer, able to snip along two or three planes. The cutting edges would be the edges of...
View ArticleOf thresholds and the forces that drive change
“But why would you want to turn farming over to machines?” Ahem! Farming has been conducted primarily by machines for going on a hundred years, at least in the United States. I want to substitute...
View ArticleCultibotics as a quality of life issue
Your typical farm raises at most a few crops, frequently only one. Because it’s what I know, and because it’s in practically every processed food you can buy, let’s take wheat as an example. Wheat...
View ArticleLe Petit Prince takes attentiveness to an extreme
Are your plants suffering from lack of attention? Perhaps this little robot is what you need. Unfortunately, you’ll need a few thousand of them if you plan to do any serious gardening. Reposted from...
View ArticleContrasting two robotic developments
The first is an autonomous agricultural robot that you can actually buy, or will be able to soon. It runs on gas and will cost around $100,000 when it becomes available early next year. FHI claims the...
View ArticleThe application of ‘elegance’ to machine behavior
We all have some idea of what elegance means, whether our notion of it is tied up with silky evening dresses, polished wood and brass, chandeliers and stained glass windows, exotic carpets, and...
View ArticleThe empowerment of small-scale industrial designers
This Wired video discusses how easy it has become to get ahold of custom parts. Not mentioned, but quite obviously working away, is a 3D printer, building up a bust using deposited material. This...
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Rail & gantry bot
This is actually a 3D printer, but [elevate the rails and] replace the print head with a couple of general purpose robotic arms and you’ve got the makings of a gardening robot. Reposted from...
View ArticleThe pursuit of collaboration
Two heads are generally better than one, and while that truism doesn’t necessarily scale very well, it can and often does in the open source software movement. Willow Garage is out to make it happen...
View ArticleA plant positioning system based on suspension
Something which could be accomplished through robotics that couldn’t economically be accomplished using human labor would be maximizing the utilization of a very limited surface area (and the sunlight...
View ArticleThe potential of agriculture as a market for robotics
When I imagine robots tending land, it’s nearly always machines that are supported from above, on a beam that itself is supported by wheels running either on rails or in troughs that double as a...
View ArticleDARPA-led consortium casts a wide net
A consortium of U.S. government agencies, lead by DARPA, has jointly issued a solicitation for small business proposals: Joint-Agency SBIR Funding Opportunity Announcement. The participating agencies...
View ArticleThe ascendency of Arduino
This video consists of the earliest participants in the Arduino project talking about how it got started. Checking Vimeo, there are over 4,000 videos there tagged “arduino”. [2012Oct14: now over...
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Harvest automation
And so it begins! The January 14th episode of Robots Podcast features an interview with Joe Jones, CTO of Harvest Automation (previously with iRobot). Harvest Automation didn’t start out with the...
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Some things can’t be done without robots
I had pretentions of being a back-to-the-land hippy before I ever became seriously interested in robotics, but my brother successfully popped that bubble with a simple, unarguable observation, that...
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Agricultural robotics and employment
At least with regard to agriculture, the effect of robotics upon employment depends on the approach taken. If your goal is to further reduce the number of people deriving an income from farming, and...
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The importance of robotics to the achievement of sustainability
In a mid-August post bearing the same title, on my primary blog, I stated: I firmly believe that (short of convincing the vast majority of people to return to subsistence farming, something which could...
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Emma Marris: Rambunctious Garden
While I fully expect Emma Marris would deem the use of robots to create her Rambunctious Garden a distraction, and my contention that robotics is necessary to the achievement of sustainability...
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Abandoned railway roadbeds
In the Emma Marris video, linked from a previous post, there appears to be an abandoned railway roadbed in the background. Such spaces almost automatically return to nature, left to themselves for a...
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Reforming agriculture through more sophisticated mechanization
Historically, at least since the mechanization of agriculture began in earnest, there have been two primary measures of agricultural productivity, the amount that could be grown on a given acreage and...
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