Experiences with FarmBot or similar gardening robots?

talklittle
2025-09-15T22:16:33Z

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.

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