A flying Farmbot!

I am planning to develop a flying farmbot, by adding the farmbot logic into a drone.

Helps us remove the boundaries, so scaling up the rigid space constraints our farmbots face as of now.

Anyone working on this concept ?

Cheers
Mohanurs

Erm, I’ve a question… how will you supply the drone with water?
If you are willing to have some kind of tank to hold the water ho huge will it be?
Another question how much light time to you predict the drone will last till batteries will be drained?

Well you could run a tethered drone with piping attached. The fly time and greater payload issues will only really be solved by using fuel cells which, although becoming available are still experimental outside of military use. I’ve been keeping an eye on drone possibilities for a number of years but most non Li fuel cell systems are in the hype but unavailability stage at the moment.

A better method for larger spaces may be a trapeze wire system, similar to the Tripod 3d printer alternative to the gantry system. Anything greater you are looking at wheeled/tracked robots which are already becoming available in the commercial farming markets. After all speed is not of the essence as they can work 24/7.

Best use of drones is for field mapping to identify fertility and drainage issues.

Julian

Thanks for your feedback.

Yes, there are critical challanges like battery power, restrictions like volume of water and few other for adapting a drone to do the farmbot job.

A tethered drone is one of the adaptations, thanks for the suggestion Julian. Let me contemplate how to.

I am already working on wheeled type weeder, well actually using caterpillar tracks using several metal links (just like a battle tank).

Perhaps I can adapt my weeder to work as a seeder, a water and nutrient doser, along with several sensor probes like pH, EC, Soil Temp,etc and even organic compost dumber more like micro JCB !

Wow, the idea is just shaping up…thrilled

:grin:

A micro tracked JCB is a good idea. The arm could have the universal head holder, but you would loose the soil where the tracks need to roll and if they were too thin they tracks would dig in, so it’s not a prefect solution for planting and tending.

can understand using an air asset for survey and observation but impractical for any other function. Perhaps coupling with autonomous ground assets for weeding, planning etc. Irrigation drip or overhead mist. I will follow you progress as I am formulating automation for a 5 acre hop yard which includes a dedicated wifi network with weather and soil sensors, Fixed drip irrigation and automous weeding vehicle.

We like crossing boundaries. :wink: Is https://www.droneseed.co/ what you are thinking about ?

I really like this idea. I have been quite interested in the Farmbot idea since I first saw it, but my drawback was that it was so limited in area, so cost wise it just isn’t the right fit for us. HOWEVER, this idea of using drones has REALLY peeked my interest! I have searched up a few ideas and there is quite a few options out there. But nothing that really fits what my husband and i are looking for. Maybe what were are looking for is too robust! lol But we LOVE the basic Farmbot idea, but would love to scale it up, however not for monoculture. We would love something that would collect data over time as well, including weather data and pest data. We would love a wildlife deterent feature and automatic gate opening and food dispensing features. Maybe not those last ones on the drone, but withing the whole system, where we can travel and be able to manage our homestead from a far. unfortunately three years ago, we lost almost everything when we had to suddenly leave for a health emergency, that ended up taking several months to find the cure…if we had some remote management system, we could have saved most of it. So its close to our heart. However, we are total beginners in all this! Any suggestions on where we could start learning the basic programming language etc?
Thanks in advance,

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I imagine that since there are already systems that spray pesticides and fertilizers, that the same could be used for irrigation… have you looked at this system here? https://agribotix.com/

I’m working on an autonomous robot for gardening. I made a website for the project, but also contact me if you are interested in helping.
http://robogro.org/

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