I was thinking the other day... It'd be really cool to have a nice garden with my own fresh veggies and stuff.
But alas, I have no time for tedious gardening!
So I thought, "Well, what if I could make a bot that pulls weeds for me? As everything else with gardening isn't that bad. Planting is a one time thing, watering is easily taken care of with a scheduler...
So I had thoughts rushing through my head....
I'd need to make it have something to pull the weeds. Maybe one of those mini augur things that you twist into the ground and it uproots weeds? (As seen on TV) Or a simple grabber that grabs and pulls. Regardless, it'd have to be powerful. The ground is tough stuff.
Ok so it'd also need a system of locomotion. That's easy enough.
The hardest part (I thought) would be recognizing what is and what is not a weed. I first thought of a camera of sorts identifying the plants. That'd be really complicated, so I scratched that idea. Then I thought, well, what if the camera looked for GREEN outside of where it knows good plants are? So it'd have a map of the garden, and it'd have the locations of where the plants are. Wherever else GREEN appears, it'd have to be a weed. Identifying a simple color is easy enough right?
I also thought, well maybe it could be connected via bluetooth or wifi to your home computer. It could then take pictures of suspecting plants and send them to your phone. You could then send an e-mail back to your computer, which would set off a program to tell the robot to either DESTROY or let alone. The computer programming stuff would be easy. A few scripts could accomplish that.
I dunno, I'm just throwing ideas out there. I did a quick google search and only found a giant yellow gardening bot thing. While cool, I wouldn't need my bot to plant things. Just weed. I hate weeding.