Open Source Robot OS Finds Niches From Farms To Space 36
jfruh (300774) writes "Blue River Technology built a robot named LettuceBot that uses computer vision to kill unwanted lettuce plants in a field. Rather than build their creation from scratch, they built off of the Robot Operating System, an open source OS that, in the words of one engineer, 'allowed only a few engineers to write an entire system and receive our first check for service in only a few months.' With ROS robots starting to appear everywhere, including the International Space Station, it looks like open source may be making huge strides in this area."
What ROS is. (Score:2, Informative)
For those like me who didn't know, it is the set of Linux packages enumerated here [ros.org].
The "lettuce bot" is mostly a vision system (Score:5, Informative)
The "lettuce bot" is an agricultural implement towed behind a tractor, not a robot. It's apparently a vision system that triggers fertilizer sprays. It's probably using the vision libraries that come with ROS, which are mostly improved versions of Intel's old OpenCV library.
Vision-guided weeding is useful, but not new. Here's a computer vision controlled plasma weeding system. [visionweeding.com] As the tractor pulls this implement along, the control system recognizes plants vs weeds, and zaps the weeds with a plasma jet, missing the plants. It's a sentry gun for weeding.
There are more computer vision systems used in food processing than most people realize. Vegetable sorting is highly automated. The flawless tomatoes go to retail stores, and the flawed ones go to the tomato sauce plant. Vision-based sorting is so fast and cheap it can be applied to peas. [youtube.com] This isn't exotic technology - it's production.