alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Sowbot – open-hardware agricultural robot (ROS2, RTK GPS)
Sowbot is an open-hardware agricultural robot designed to close the "prototype gap" that kills most agri-robotics startups and research projects — the 18+ months spent on drivers, networking, safety watchdogs, and UI before you can even start on the thing you actually care about.
The hardware is built around a stackable 10×10cm compute module with two ARM Cortex-A55 SBCs — one for ROS 2 navigation/EKF localisation, one dedicated to vision/YOLO inference — connected via a single ethernet cable.
Centimetre-level positioning via dual RTK GNSS, CAN bus for field comms, and real-time motor control via ESP32 running Lizard firmware.
Everything — schematics, PCB layouts, firmware — is under open licences. The software stack runs on RoSys/Field Friend (for teams who want fast iteration) or DevKit ROS (for teams already in the ROS ecosystem). The idea is that a lab in one country can reproduce another lab's experiment by sharing a Docker image.
Current status: the Open Core brain is largely fabricated, the full-size Sowbot body has a detailed BOM but isn't yet assembled, and we have two smaller dev platforms (Mini and Pico) in various stages of testing.
We're a small volunteer team and we're looking for contributors — hardware, ROS, firmware, docs, whatever you can offer.
The best place to start is our Discord: https://discord.gg/SvztEBr4KZ — we have a weekly call if you'd prefer to just show up and chat.
GitHub: https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/feldfreund_devkit_ros/tre...
Comments
> The hardware is built around a stackable 10×10cm compute module with two ARM Cortex-A55 SBCs — one for ROS 2 navigation/EKF localisation, one dedicated to vision/YOLO inference — connected via a single ethernet cable.
I will preface this by saying that I have nothing against ARM per se, that my employer/team supported a good chunk of the work for making ROS 2 actually work on arm64, and that there is some good hardware out there.
I really don't understand why startups and research projects keep using weird ARM SBCs for their robots. The best of these SBCs is still vastly shittier in terms of software support and stability than any random Chinese Intel ADL-N box. The only reasons to use (weird) ARM SBCs in robots are that either (1) you are using a Jetson for Jetson things (i.e. Nvidia libraries), or (2) you have a product which requires serious cost optimization to be produced at a large scale. Otherwise you are just committing yourselves and your users/customers to a future of terrible-to-nonexistent support and adding significantly to the amount of work you need to bring up the new system and port existing tools to it.
What's your payload? Where are the seeds? How are they deposited?
Recommend going to a farm right now to see how this works in production. For the most part, you can autonomously sow using GPS. But the farmer just rides along.
Very cool! shameless self promotion but check out greenwave-monitor[1] for the 'Diagnostics TUI'. I'll get it into the buildfarm soon.
outside of sowing would you consider some open source drones like the new DJI with agriculture payload attached to it.
or some automated green house with open source designs.
love the name sowbot.
From a video somewhere in the page: "The aim is to make food production more sustainable and efficient" yet requires a web app. I'd hope that you can run the server side on a local machine and not require cloud connectivity.
I highly encourage you to go visit farms sooner rather than later, especially during the rainy seasons and winter when farmers are really at work preparing for the next season. The kind of conditions robots need to deal with in that environment is no joke.
I also notice you're using the BNO055 -- if you need an C++ I2C ROS driver for it I wrote one (https://github.com/dheera/ros-imu-bno055). I think the one in the ROS apt-get repository is written in Python but they claimed the package name before I did
This is the future, good luck to you
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Looks great for a prototype. Has any modeling, simulation, or analysis been done of its off-road performance, i.e. mobility, GO/NOGO, motive efficiency, maneuverability on deformable terrain? This is critical for agricultural applications.
Has any stress analysis been done on the frame? Looks to me like it could use a couple more triangles to reinforce those rectangles.
Have you designed a skid-steering controller for it? Off-road skid steering can be quite variable obviously depending on terrain properties.