[PLUG-TALK] robotic dandelion harvester
Keith Lofstrom
keithl at kl-ic.com
Thu Aug 19 16:58:11 UTC 2010
We live in the 'burbs, with a huge back yard. Dandelions grow
better than grass. If we let them flower, they spread seeds
and piss off the neighbors, who tend to use herbicides to get
rid of them. This adds poisons to the world.
Water-starved dandelions are about 25% "non-structural" free
sugars. Dandelion syrup, dandelion wine ... lots of uses. So
dandelions are not evil, just unwelcome in a typical suburb.
The high sugar makes them unsuitable for animal feed - goats
can get diabetes, too - and zoning ordinances prevent us from
raising most farm animals anyway.
What if we cultivated dandelions, and cut off the flowers or
buds before they made seeds and propagated? Then we don't
piss off the neighbors, we have a usable crop, and I don't
have a lawn to mow.
While cutting off the tops is labor intensive, the flowers and
perhaps even the buds should be easy to identify with machine
vision. Yellow versus green. Usually sticks up many inches
above ground level. Duh.
Perhaps a small robot can wander the yard, clip off the tops,
and collect them. With a 1 foot wide working path, a robot
moving 6 inches per second could tend half an acre per day.
It would not need to be autonomous. At those speeds it could
reel and unreel a cord, perhaps a CAT5 with power-over-ethernet
to a computer in the house, and operate on low power.
We could put the visual feed up on the web. Weed cam.
Any thoughts? Who does robotics here? Who wants to play?
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
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