Hi,
Complete newbie here, apologies if I’m asking dumb questions which may have been answered and I couldn’t find or this is inappropriate.
I have a small hobby vineyard and was looking at automation. I have a tractor, sprayer, mower and was looking at anything from partially assisting (turning sprayer on and off at row ends, etc) to automating existing tractor and mower to building a dedicated robot, got a hydrostatic mower as basis for platform. Have spoken to client and university to do a project using as test case. I can program in python or c (arduino). Also have servers with gpus for main business, could do some heavier ai image processing if needed.
Anyway I thought someone must have done something similar and just found your site. I will build custom hardware to control tractor, easy enough to get an arduino to control steering and actuators, although manual gearbox and mechanical rpm but I’d like to steer and guide based on vision or sensing vineyard rows. Plus have a zero turn mower I’d like to get to mow vineyard and garden.
Would like to monitor spray rates and speed etc.
Would also like to record crop progress and detect disease etc. Plus targeted weed removal.
Is your stuff a good starting point and easy to adapt and has anyone tackled vineyard row steering and I’ll need careful turning as heads a bit tight and on a slope.
Or am I better to start from scratch rather than figure out code.
Any suggestions. If someone fun is interested in helping with the project, happy to pay in wine, we have a really good sparkling white, our red last year was not bad. It’s only a hectare and makes a loss as equipment and chemicals and a little bit of labour cost more than I can sell for.
I’m in Kent UK. Obviously remote coding possible, someone local ish who wants to visit and tinker with hardware welcome.
Any comments and suggestions welcome.