One of our priorities with the Precision Farming Rover (PFR) and our other technologies has been the development and employment of open-source hardware and software. Our goal with this approach is to provide a product that farmers, technology partners, and researchers will have the ability to maintain, repair, and modify themselves so that our PFR can be customized to fit a wide variety of applications and updated for unique specifications.
The majority of our mechanical design consists of parts that are currently available as off the shelf components or can be easily fabricated anywhere in the world. If a farmer wants to add their own equipment, they can use standard connections such as our CAT1 three point hitch or standard 2 inch tube frame, which has been used for decades on existing farming equipment. If a part breaks down, farmers can reference the materials we share to know exactly how to replace it. With our updated mechanical design to be released, customers can be confident that they will have access to the newest, most up-to-date materials for their PFR.
Additionally, we contribute to the open-source community with our use of ROS2, a set of software libraries and tools for building robots and their applications. ROS2 allows us to have an open interface that people can easily access and develop, as well as utilizing the platform’s benefit of having independent nodes that can seamlessly communicate. The hardware in the Precision Farming Rover is designed around an edge computing approach where each hardware module has its own microcontroller, and every microcontroller can be a full-fledged member of the ROS2 communication network. Thus, we bypass the need for a central host computer so users can directly connect to and subscribe to data from any microcontroller or subsystem on the robot. This creates fault-tolerant, resilient systems that are easy to monitor and debug, and customers can publish and subscribe to topics relating to our technology.
The open-source nature of our Precision Farming Rover is a unique innovation in agricultural robots, and one that promises significant gains over time through its capacity to be constantly refined by its users. It’s a win-win situation; users can modify the product to fit their needs, and we receive constant feedback on how customers want to see our product changed and updated. We believe that open-source product development empowers users by allowing them to not only repair but also modify their equipment to fit every unique application.
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