I'm info dumping some links about open-source robotics. The rabbit hole runs deep and this barely scratches the surface.

Disclaimer: I haven't tried any of these yet. Based on a cursory search and following links from the great Open-source robotics Wikipedia page.

Robotics simulation on Godot

• https://github.com/flynneva/godot_ros - Proof-of-concept integrating ROS2 (Robot Operating System) with Godot, for a 3D robot simulation environment. (Updated 8 months ago)

• https://github.com/nordstream3/Godot-4-ROS2-integration - A fork(?) of the above. The readme is clearer with visual examples of what it's meant for. (Updated 12 months ago)

• https://github.com/plaans/gobot-sim - A top-down 2D factory simulation of packages being processed by machines. (Updated 3 months ago)

• https://lab.nexedi.com/nexedi/godot-modbus-demo - Exposing a modbus interface to control simulated industrial components. (Updated 5 years ago.) Comes with a blog post which might be more recent (a year ago?).

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18408 - "Exploring Flexible Scenario Generation in Godot Simulator" about generating simulated physical scenes for testing computer-controlled cars. Write-up only with no code. (Submitted 9 months ago)

Robotic car simulation on Unreal Engine and Unity

• https://github.com/carla-simulator/carla - "CARLA is an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research." They mostly target Unreal Engine. Regularly updated and popular with 13k stars on GitHub.

• https://github.com/microsoft/AirSim - Microsoft and IAMAI collaborated (plus DARPA funding?) to create an open source simulation platform for both flying drones and autonomous cars. Targets Unreal Engine and experimentally Unity also. Soon being sunset and replaced with a new project confusingly named "Project AirSim."

• https://github.com/iamaisim/ProjectAirSim - The successor to AirSim. The GitHub shows it's only at version 0.1.1 though.

Robot Operating System (ROS2)

• https://github.com/ros2/ros2

• https://docs.ros.org/en/kilted/Tutorials.html - Tutorials beginning with TurtleSim, a top-down 2D turtle scene where you control turtles. Looks like ROS2 uses familiar network messaging patterns like Publish-Subscribe.

• https://vimeo.com/osrfoundation/videos/sort:date - Presentation videos. Looks like the Open Robotics foundation just completed a developers' conference in Japan two days ago. The presentations from ROSCon JP are Japanese-language-only. Next one is coming very soon this October in Singapore.

How to get started?

That's a lot of links. I'd first figure out what I want to do. Humanoid robots seem popular lately—like the Berkeley 3d printed robot—so it'd be interesting to start there, although it doesn't map cleanly onto the projects I linked. So maybe if I imagined a robot with a human torso and arms, but with wheels and car-like locomotion. Then I could use a combination of the car simulators and probably ROS2 to deal with the upper body components? Or maybe there is another solution for the torso and arms that is a more direct fit than ROS2? Maybe iRobot/Roomba has a better solution for the car-like locomotion at this small scale?

Anyone used these before and have a story to share? Anyone curious to try one out and report back? I plan to, but no idea on my schedule.

This is just a random thought I had. I don't do gardening currently and not looking for advice per se. Just thinking about how the physical world feels far behind in terms of automation compared to the digital world, and wondering what kind of possibilities are out there. I was wondering how close we are to having consumer-form-factor robots to help with various things, and growing food is a natural starting place.

I was imagining what kind of robots are needed to deal with a garden—assuming a house with a plot of land suitable for a large garden—with tasks like:

• Fetching water, either from plumbed water or a natural water source
• Getting seeds from somewhere. Maybe online shopping and then the robot knowing how to open the box. (Probably not by identifying existing plants and picking/stealing them.)
• Planting the seeds in the right place
• Watering the plants regularly
• Maintaining temperature and sun exposure
• Digging up the plant and bringing it indoors so I can inspect or smell it without having to go outside. Then replanting it safely.
• Determining when food is ripe, picking it, reusing the seeds
• Washing and cooking it

It feels like a lot of these are already available off-the-shelf today. I searched and there is a project which I hadn't heard of before called FarmBot which seems neat and geared toward enthusiasts ("prosumers") and education, and includes open source hardware and software. To be clear I'm not affiliated with them in any way.

FarmBot probably handles a lot of the important parts of gardening, but I'm sure it doesn't handle everything on my list. How far are we from a 100% automated experience?

Other than that there was some recent marketing around cheap robots like LeRobot by HuggingFace (the company where basically all the open-weight AI models are hosted). It has nothing to do with farming except that they have one shaped like a hand, so it could probably be programmed to grasp and move things around.

Sorry for the rambling post. Really curious to hear if anyone else has gone into robotics and interested in hearing your experiences and also other resources on what state-of-the-art looks like. Also I bet a lot of this is solved in proprietary solutions and by Big Agriculture, but right now I'm more curious on the consumer-grade level.