Whacking weeds is not going to be effective when those cuttings start to grow anew. This is a common problem we have in our garden with purslane when other family member's prefer to rototill the weeds.
They claim that the weeds will not have any energy left when being continuously destroyed. I'd like to see proof of that claim.
I'v had some success using a torch and propane tank but that is very time consuming.
Thanks for linking. I was hoping it had some kind of sea urchin-style mouth that ate up the roots of the weeds, but it's just a tiny weed wacker underneath. Still cute
Which means it never needs emptying and it returns the weed as nutrients immediately. It's pretty elegant in its simplicity imo. I guess scaled up a bit it could keep my lawn nicely mowed as well.
$2000 would go a long way toward building your own robomower.
Find a broken lawnmower in the trash for "bulk pickup" - free (getting it fixed might cost a bit of money, but in most cases, mowers get thrown away because the carb gets gunked up due to not being stored properly, or the air filter needs cleaning; ie cheap fixes).
Get the base or motors/wheels from an electric wheelchair (this might cost a bit of money, but should be doable for under $200 if you look carefully).
Various bits of steel, castors, bolts, etc - under $100.00 if you scrounge.
RasPi Zero W, GPS/IMU, sensors, etc (ie, electronics, sans motor controller) - $100.00, maybe a bit more.
Motor Controller - spend money on a good one, or money on the parts to build a good one. Probably looking at $200-500 dollars for a dual-motor controller. If you are really cheap, though, you can build a decent dual motor controller for the price of four 40 amp BOSCH relays, some wire, and one or two 40 amp DC SSRs; that'll get you a controller for well under $100.00, just don't expect great things from it.
The rest is up to you. Granted, that's the hard part, which may be worth the $2k depending on your skills, time, patience, etc.
Also, if you're confident enough in your coding skills to attach the code you wrote to a motorized vehicle with sharp, rapidly spinning blades attached to it.
Exactly, you can do a lot of amazing things with less money than certain things sell for. Most people spend that premium because the time required to build X for cheaper isn't worth it in the long run. (unless, like you said, its apart of someones interest or hobby)
When I was in college, I had more time than money, so it made sense to do these DIY things. Now that I have kids and a good income, I have more money than time, so I tend towards buying solutions to easily solvable problems. It sometimes makes me sad that I don't get to tinker, but I'd rather spend time with the kids.
Hopefully as they get older, we can combine spending time together and tinkering!
A couple of things you're missing:
1) Motivation. How many of these have you or anybody you know built and regularly use?
2) All the details. They require many skills, tools, experimentation, time, and spending of money.
As an example, I'm in the middle of a stalled project now where I want to make nice looking fishmouth pipe joints. I decided to cut them with a hole saw. But I don't have an electric drill that's slow enough so I've struggled doing it by hand and with a windscreen wiper motor, all the time wondering if it would be worth buying a drill press, but not the cheap ones from the home handyman shop because their minimum RPM is too high. I saw a cheap used one with no motor online so maybe I could somehow get an old washing machine motor and build some adapters to fit it together and buy an electronic controller - and that would be a whole new project in itself! What a lot of fiddly, costly details to "just weld some pipes together".
a friend and I were recording a song one day. I wondered why he wouldn't build himself a vocal booth. His reply was: "I'd like to record a song. If I were to start building a vocal booth, at the end of the day I wouldn't have a recorded song, but a vocal booth instead." Really made me reflect and become more mindful of goals and outcomes of my decisions and actions in work and life.
The video calls "the typical garden size in the US" 100 sq ft (or 9 m^2). I find it hard to wrap my head around that number. If I had 9m^2 of green, I would never call that a garden.
Surely this is the average, but not the mean? As lots of apartments won't have gardens at all.
I think maybe they are using the word "garden" in the US sense of "part of your land sectioned off to grow vegetables, fruits, etc.", not "the green space in your land surrounding the home" which we'd refer to as the lawn.
TLDR; you are supposed to get rid of all weeds in your garden first, then this little robot will take care of all new weeds growing out of the ground. It's supposed to be pretty much maintenance free and runs on only sunlight.
Am I wrong thinking that after a few weeks of cutting the leaves, the root will become gigantic and will keep producing leaves at a faster rate? The only way to get rid of dandelions is to pull the ever growing root from the ground.
How does it remove them? Won’t the weeds just grow back?
Tertill whacks weeds using a spinning string trimmer, which cuts the weed off near the ground. Because Tertill lives in your garden and goes looking for weeds every day, weeds are always small when the robot finds them. A whacked weed may sprout again, but sprouting takes energy stored in the seed or root. By coming back every day, Tertill never lets a weed develop the leaves it needs to replenish this energy, so eventually the weed gives up and dies.
its a war of attrition... keep taking the leaves and limit the plants ability to perform photosynthesis, it will run out of energy and wither at some point.
Tertill uses four-wheel-drive. This helps Tertill move through soft soil, sand, and mulch, and also helps Tertill climb slopes. Its distinctive diagonal wheels make Tertill more stable on slopes and help it get past certain terrain challenges. Tertill relies on several sensors and clever programming to keep out of trouble. To detect objects like the garden fence and big plants, Tertill uses sensors similar to those found in many smart phones—the lightest touch is all it takes. To detect steep slopes, Tertill uses the same sort of sensor that tells your cell phone which way is up. Tertill can also sense if a motor stops turning—perhaps jammed by a rock—so it can protect itself from damage.
Tank tracks have problems at a small scale that aren't immediately apparent at full scale.
The big one - especially for something "in the dirt" - is dirt/mud getting between the tracks and ground wheels/idlers. This can easily stop the drive system, requiring user maintenance. Then there's the issue with water rusting parts (shafts, screws, etc). Also, more moving parts equal more things to break. Finally, on a small scale, tracks have a tendency to be easily "thrown" from the wheels depending on how turning is accomplished and the terrain.
On a full sized tank or bulldozer, tracks still have these issues, but in the case of dirt, it can just power through the obstacles; dirt and mud may build up, and cause some rust, but the important bits are kept constantly lubricated. Any parts that do grind up the dirt just wear down instead of stopping (and eventually need replacement - very $$$$ replacement). If anyone cares to, hosing off the tracks with a water truck can also be done, but isn't likely to be done. Again, it all comes down to maintenance.
Also, full scale tracked vehicles rarely turn "en point", because their tracks can be thrown just as easily as on the smaller scale, but cause more damage and more repair $$$ needed to fix/replace (plus doing it in the field isn't easy, either). The proper way to turn such a vehicle is to not perform such maneuvers, or if you have to, make sure you're on relatively flat and soft ground (that you don't mind utterly destroying - beware your wife's rose garden), and do it fairly slowly. The side load on the tracks and idlers will still be just as high, but throwing the track isn't as great. Usually, though, you steer in a curve just like a car, except using differential speeds on each track. There will still be side loads and "skidding", but the loads are much, much less (also, this is why such machines, whether tracked or wheeled, are known as "skid steered" or "differential steering").
The whole thing is a "nice try" but spending money on something like this isn't green--we're supposed to be consuming less overall and this hunk of plastic will break within six months and then sit on a shelf until it inevitably enters the waste stream as difficult to recycle e-trash.
When are people going to wake up and figure out that all this speculative entrepreneurial-ism is pretty much just money making scams that exist as the cost of the environment?
Don't want weeds? Be a gardener. Or don't be a gardener: This whole dilettante Instagram gardener bullshit is what needs to die.
This won't work! The hardest place to weed is in the grass and around strawberries.... both of these can be just as short as weeds, and from the "how it works" page, it looks like it is using height of plant to determine if it's a weed.
I guess I meant, it "won't work" for me personally... and using height as an indicator of weediness seems risky.... at some point you'll have a tiny new seedling that you want to keep and you'll have to remember to work around your weeder... just doesn't seem as convenient as I would imagine it in my ideal world.
If you only need to remove weeds manually in the first few weeks after seeding instead of all the time, that's a potentially substantial reduction of labor cost.
Same with strawberry picking robots: It's not a dealbreaker if they have only 50% precision. That still means you have halved your labor costs (and time requirements) for the picking step (assuming that the robot picks in the night, then workers pick the remainder during the day).
> at some point you'll have a tiny new seedling that you want to keep and you'll have to remember to work around your weeder.
There's a metal guard you put down around small plants that prevents Tertill from mowing them down. The video does a pretty good job explaining the basic operation.
I have a similar problem. I plant a lot of cucumbers and cantaloupe. Any vine-like plant that grows along the ground isn't going to work with this. But, I plant tomatoes and peppers on the other end of the garden, so...
I live in a big city, so I can't experiment - but is it possible to put up some sort of raised horizontal platform for those types of plants? Once it gets big enough, raise it up, put it on the platform, and let it grow horizontally, but off the ground?
Or do cucumbers periodically put down roots like strawberry clutches do?
Instead of weeding your grass, mix it with clover, which fertilizes and helps fill in spots where weeds might otherwise grow. Also, let some "weeds" grow. Monoculture lawns aren't great for nature.
Strawberries would be a worst-case for this design. The plants are low and spreading, and weeds tend to start under them and then pop up through -- so it's the tall plant that's bad and the short one that's not only wanted, but when the fruit are setting, very delicate. Little slanty robot wheels would make jam out of the berries.
Also, typically your rows of strawberries are long and separated by only a few inches, so the stakes, or croquet wickets they are selling wouldn't work. There wouldn't be room between the rows of wickets for the robot to move.
Oh, you have to put markers around non-weeds. It's not like the John Deere/Blue River weeding machine.[1] Or the Ecorobotics weeding robot. Those use machine learning to recognize weeds visually.
I'd choose a proven, 100% reliable criteria such as markers rather than fuzzy methods like machine learning which evolve and can break/behave inexpectedly over time.
So you will end up with a bunch of weeds inside your collar. Someone hasn't thought this through. I've walked a lot of fields over a twenty year period, weeds aren't always in the middle of the rows.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h8oWl6FD-7c : there are many mechanical weeding robots for field cultivation. France’s Naio Technologies is my favourite. They are coming to North America soon.
It seems like Europe is far ahead of us with robotics and field automation. In America, we have always had abundant cheap labour.
Also, American Agtech is a data play and geared towards commodity crops. That’s not always suitable for food crops and speciality food crops and fruits etc.
Edited to add: I guess tertill is for gardens. It’s not bad but can be better.
Thanks for this saying this. It's time to move beyond Haber-Bosch. It's been a tremendous force for good, but in the quote un quote developed world it is time employ farming practices that don't definitionally exceed the carrying capacity of the land.
It's true. But once they've established themselves they're a pain to get out. I've been on a bunch of ivy pulls, done a bunch of blackberry and japanese knotweed removal. Once they're in, they're incredibly hard to remove and outcompete everything else. Blackberries do not replace salmon berries and huckleberries as cover for birds, nothing uses japanese knotweed and ivy pulls trees down.
I recall reading some years ago the NC State horticulture school had determined that the only two effective methods for eliminating kudzu were agent orange and goats.
Sure, nothing against trying to fight invasive species. But with certain techniques, plants grown in a cooperative state will work together to out-compete the unwanted weeds in the first place. What I am talking about is preventative action.
That method only works for about one season, and then you have to redo it all. I guess if you like gardening redoing the cardboard isn't so bad, but I'd rather focus on the plants and not the cardboard.
I don't redo everything every season! I like to garden smart, not hard. Check out permaculture.
Last year, I put down cardboard and mulched - planting strawberries directly in the mulch and piercing through the cardboard. Fast forward a year, now that the cardboard is pretty composted, the strawberries were established last year had root systems in place, broke through the cardboard, and beat most of the weeds. The weeds can't thrive because the strawberries are taking up all the sun.
Sounds like you have a similar effective way for handling weeds. My main point was that I don't think most gardeners have an issue with weeds in their garden.
Side note, using large pieces of cardboard or packaging paper goes fairly quick. I wouldn't consider it hard or time consuming.
I maintain my position at the time: weeding is almost never just weeding. You're there monitoring a lot of different aspects of your plants' health and progress; you need to do that whether you're weeding or not, so you might as well be weeding.
This is a solution in search of a problem, and none of these people seem like gardeners.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you throw some seeds in the ground and check them a few weeks later because it's not an engineering project. That's what I do in the summer. I've had a few issues over the years but my successes outnumber my failures despite being a bit inattentive.
I'm surprised they haven't taken the time to create 2 equal gardens one with the robot one without it. If it works then this type of demonstration would be a great marketing win for the company.
By not having a sample garden, it makes me dought the effectiveness of it since it such an easy thing to do.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadThey claim that the weeds will not have any energy left when being continuously destroyed. I'd like to see proof of that claim.
I'v had some success using a torch and propane tank but that is very time consuming.
Find a broken lawnmower in the trash for "bulk pickup" - free (getting it fixed might cost a bit of money, but in most cases, mowers get thrown away because the carb gets gunked up due to not being stored properly, or the air filter needs cleaning; ie cheap fixes).
Get the base or motors/wheels from an electric wheelchair (this might cost a bit of money, but should be doable for under $200 if you look carefully).
Various bits of steel, castors, bolts, etc - under $100.00 if you scrounge.
RasPi Zero W, GPS/IMU, sensors, etc (ie, electronics, sans motor controller) - $100.00, maybe a bit more.
Motor Controller - spend money on a good one, or money on the parts to build a good one. Probably looking at $200-500 dollars for a dual-motor controller. If you are really cheap, though, you can build a decent dual motor controller for the price of four 40 amp BOSCH relays, some wire, and one or two 40 amp DC SSRs; that'll get you a controller for well under $100.00, just don't expect great things from it.
The rest is up to you. Granted, that's the hard part, which may be worth the $2k depending on your skills, time, patience, etc.
Hopefully as they get older, we can combine spending time together and tinkering!
Now draw the rest of the owl.
As an example, I'm in the middle of a stalled project now where I want to make nice looking fishmouth pipe joints. I decided to cut them with a hole saw. But I don't have an electric drill that's slow enough so I've struggled doing it by hand and with a windscreen wiper motor, all the time wondering if it would be worth buying a drill press, but not the cheap ones from the home handyman shop because their minimum RPM is too high. I saw a cheap used one with no motor online so maybe I could somehow get an old washing machine motor and build some adapters to fit it together and buy an electronic controller - and that would be a whole new project in itself! What a lot of fiddly, costly details to "just weld some pipes together".
Surely this is the average, but not the mean? As lots of apartments won't have gardens at all.
I think you mean (hah!) “median” at the end as average is the mean.
Tertill whacks weeds using a spinning string trimmer, which cuts the weed off near the ground. Because Tertill lives in your garden and goes looking for weeds every day, weeds are always small when the robot finds them. A whacked weed may sprout again, but sprouting takes energy stored in the seed or root. By coming back every day, Tertill never lets a weed develop the leaves it needs to replenish this energy, so eventually the weed gives up and dies.
https://www.tertill.com/how-it-works/
Will Tertill get stuck?
Tertill uses four-wheel-drive. This helps Tertill move through soft soil, sand, and mulch, and also helps Tertill climb slopes. Its distinctive diagonal wheels make Tertill more stable on slopes and help it get past certain terrain challenges. Tertill relies on several sensors and clever programming to keep out of trouble. To detect objects like the garden fence and big plants, Tertill uses sensors similar to those found in many smart phones—the lightest touch is all it takes. To detect steep slopes, Tertill uses the same sort of sensor that tells your cell phone which way is up. Tertill can also sense if a motor stops turning—perhaps jammed by a rock—so it can protect itself from damage.
Overall, this seems very much designed for ideal environments - smooth, relatively dry, etc.
The big one - especially for something "in the dirt" - is dirt/mud getting between the tracks and ground wheels/idlers. This can easily stop the drive system, requiring user maintenance. Then there's the issue with water rusting parts (shafts, screws, etc). Also, more moving parts equal more things to break. Finally, on a small scale, tracks have a tendency to be easily "thrown" from the wheels depending on how turning is accomplished and the terrain.
On a full sized tank or bulldozer, tracks still have these issues, but in the case of dirt, it can just power through the obstacles; dirt and mud may build up, and cause some rust, but the important bits are kept constantly lubricated. Any parts that do grind up the dirt just wear down instead of stopping (and eventually need replacement - very $$$$ replacement). If anyone cares to, hosing off the tracks with a water truck can also be done, but isn't likely to be done. Again, it all comes down to maintenance.
Also, full scale tracked vehicles rarely turn "en point", because their tracks can be thrown just as easily as on the smaller scale, but cause more damage and more repair $$$ needed to fix/replace (plus doing it in the field isn't easy, either). The proper way to turn such a vehicle is to not perform such maneuvers, or if you have to, make sure you're on relatively flat and soft ground (that you don't mind utterly destroying - beware your wife's rose garden), and do it fairly slowly. The side load on the tracks and idlers will still be just as high, but throwing the track isn't as great. Usually, though, you steer in a curve just like a car, except using differential speeds on each track. There will still be side loads and "skidding", but the loads are much, much less (also, this is why such machines, whether tracked or wheeled, are known as "skid steered" or "differential steering").
When are people going to wake up and figure out that all this speculative entrepreneurial-ism is pretty much just money making scams that exist as the cost of the environment?
Don't want weeds? Be a gardener. Or don't be a gardener: This whole dilettante Instagram gardener bullshit is what needs to die.
(One college grad, one still in college).
Close, but not quite. Just wait for the 20 "I'm stuck" notifications.
Edit: there is a video but it only show up on the desktop version.
The "hero" image/banner is a simple video demonstrating the "robot vacuum" behavior, in a garden.
I have used the Divi theme a bunch and I think if you watch the actual link where the video is you should be able to check it out.
Got me excited for a second.
https://www.tertill.com/how-it-works/ "Tertill has a very simple method. Weeds are short, plants are tall."
Same with strawberry picking robots: It's not a dealbreaker if they have only 50% precision. That still means you have halved your labor costs (and time requirements) for the picking step (assuming that the robot picks in the night, then workers pick the remainder during the day).
There's a metal guard you put down around small plants that prevents Tertill from mowing them down. The video does a pretty good job explaining the basic operation.
Or do cucumbers periodically put down roots like strawberry clutches do?
Also, typically your rows of strawberries are long and separated by only a few inches, so the stakes, or croquet wickets they are selling wouldn't work. There wouldn't be room between the rows of wickets for the robot to move.
[1] http://www.bluerivertechnology.com/ [2] https://www.ecorobotix.com/
Sweet baby Jesus ... the Blue River Technology robot looks like a greenhouse on wheels, and not even a small greenhouse.
It seems like Europe is far ahead of us with robotics and field automation. In America, we have always had abundant cheap labour.
Also, American Agtech is a data play and geared towards commodity crops. That’s not always suitable for food crops and speciality food crops and fruits etc.
Edited to add: I guess tertill is for gardens. It’s not bad but can be better.
And I don't want to think about what it does to slugs and snails...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming
https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/permaculture-gardeni...
The robot seems practical enough though. At least it has solar panels built in!
https://www.invasive.org/weeds.cfm
This book does a great job examining invasives and their supposed effects on ecosystems: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25782048-beyond-the-war-...
I find cardboard or brown packaging paper between rows, & layering the whole garden with grass & straw reduces all but a few random weeds.
I don't understand the value of weeding robots outside large agriculture.
Last year, I put down cardboard and mulched - planting strawberries directly in the mulch and piercing through the cardboard. Fast forward a year, now that the cardboard is pretty composted, the strawberries were established last year had root systems in place, broke through the cardboard, and beat most of the weeds. The weeds can't thrive because the strawberries are taking up all the sun.
Side note, using large pieces of cardboard or packaging paper goes fairly quick. I wouldn't consider it hard or time consuming.
I don't think I would buy something like this.
I maintain my position at the time: weeding is almost never just weeding. You're there monitoring a lot of different aspects of your plants' health and progress; you need to do that whether you're weeding or not, so you might as well be weeding.
This is a solution in search of a problem, and none of these people seem like gardeners.
By not having a sample garden, it makes me dought the effectiveness of it since it such an easy thing to do.