Row crops and monoculture could present interesting automated harvesting opportunities
For example, here’s a mechanical harvester for microgreens.
Right now, it uses manpower and a hand drill for power (simple, great solution) but to scale it up… It probably wouldn’t take a whole lot to rig something like that to a track system and then just sense for approximate cutting height at the blade on the Z axis. For crops that are ‘felled’ rather than dug or picked, the right planting orientation could probably make a system like that workable on a small enough scale to be accessible to independent growers.
Like many technological things I don’t see why FarmBot shouldn’t eventually get implemented in larger scale agriculture, especially some of these aeroponics and hydroponics factories. Anyways trying to stay on topic with harvesting. I’m thinking about a small cage device similar to what is on your hand held fruit pickers used with fruit trees. Sure that’s not going to work for lettuce and root vegetables so they will need something different. I’m thinking at least 3-4 different tools: hanging mid-air, ground-level (lettuce, spinach, etc.) and those below grand level (grabs and pulls the plant up and possibly sifts the soil for things like potatoes and peanuts). There isn’t going to be a one size fits all unless it’s a super multi-tool device.
Hey Man, one of the barriers is the electrical power that’s available at the Univeral Tool Mount. The problem is that there’s no heavy gauge wires that will provide 110 V power to the tools that you’re envisioning. In order to do cutting or raking or tilling or any type of real harvesting more power will be required at the UTM. I think that there’s already plans to develop more power at the UTM.