Has any stress analysis been done on the frame? Looks to me like it could use a couple more triangles to reinforce those rectangles.
Have you designed a skid-steering controller for it? Off-road skid steering can be quite variable obviously depending on terrain properties.
Hoping RTK dual-F9P moving-base setup (M4 in the roadmap) largely sidesteps the worst of this — NAV-RELPOSNED gives us a real heading vector independent of wheel odometry, and the robot_localisation EKF can weight RTK heavily and odometry lightly when GNSS quality is good.
The frame will almost certainly need more triangles
I will preface this by saying that I have nothing against ARM per se, that my employer/team supported a good chunk of the work for making ROS 2 actually work on arm64, and that there is some good hardware out there.
I really don't understand why startups and research projects keep using weird ARM SBCs for their robots. The best of these SBCs is still vastly shittier in terms of software support and stability than any random Chinese Intel ADL-N box. The only reasons to use (weird) ARM SBCs in robots are that either (1) you are using a Jetson for Jetson things (i.e. Nvidia libraries), or (2) you have a product which requires serious cost optimization to be produced at a large scale. Otherwise you are just committing yourselves and your users/customers to a future of terrible-to-nonexistent support and adding significantly to the amount of work you need to bring up the new system and port existing tools to it.
Obviously, anyone can have there own opinion on this. I work in robotics, we are quite happy with our A53 and M4. Though, we use a SOM, not a SBC, if you feel like splitting hairs.
But generally projects which are choosing some random SBC aren't using any of these features, and are just suffering the pain/imposing it on their users for no good reason.
Part of the point of this for me is to see what's possible with open hardware (down to chip level at least)
> Part of the point of this for me is to see what's possible with open hardware (down to chip level at least)
I appreciate the idea, but this is essentially saying "this project will prioritize a specific choice of one (core) piece of hardware to the detriment of everything else, users included". Approximately none of your potential users are going to benefit from the "openness" of the SBC versus that of a more broadly-supported platform (I say "openness" because the reality of SBCs is that actually finding a usefully performant one that is completely blob-free is almost impossible). Open hardware means very little if it isn't running an upstream kernel and userland.
The Mainline kernel for this particular board is _almost_ there 6.20 or so I expect. Armbian support is good.
https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tre...
In a few years we'll all be using more open RISCV stuff of course.
Recommend going to a farm right now to see how this works in production. For the most part, you can autonomously sow using GPS. But the farmer just rides along.
For me personally mechanical between row weeding is step one, then laser in-row weeding.
1. These on some linear actuators: https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-... (they work surprisingly well)
2. Beyond that for in-row weeding a engraving laser on a Delta: https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/m...
Or if I'm feeling rich by then this third party weeder looks pretty good https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER
3. For Seeding my salad crop https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang
4. Harvesting my salad crop https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester
I live on a farm, I have sold salad commercially, these are largely tools I already use and own, just moved about by motors rather than muscles.
This is a smaller scale thing than arable. We're talking a step up from manual horticulture (which is actually what still feeds much of the world)
or some automated green house with open source designs.
love the name sowbot.
I did sketch out a slightly more 'professionalised' version, but haven't built it yet https://github.com/samuk/IoT-Greenhouse-Temperature-and-Irri...
I'd be pleasantly surprised if DJI had done anything open source, Ardupilot is pretty capable of course. I really want to automate the time consuming labour parts of horticulture, for me that's mostly weeding and to a lesser extent harvesting.
I also notice you're using the BNO055 -- if you need an C++ I2C ROS driver for it I wrote one (https://github.com/dheera/ros-imu-bno055). I think the one in the ROS apt-get repository is written in Python but they claimed the package name before I did
Will check out your Bno055 currently using the upstream one in Lizard
https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/... https://github.com/zauberzeug/lizard/blob/main/main/modules/...
Any review of that welcome too of course.
Strapping something like the Jang P6 to it is probably feasible https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang
For the harvester it would be a bolt on for https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester or maybe https://reagtools.co.uk/products/babyleaf-harvester-80cm (I grow green salads)
Beyond that for in-row weeding a engraving laser on a Delta: https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/m...
Or if I'm feeling rich by then this third party weeder looks pretty good https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER
In my head it's £3-£5k, so by the time it's useful probably a bit more than that.
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Thank you.