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.

I recently got a Loona, one of those "smart" robot pets. My kid isn't great with real pets yet so we're trying to ease into things, sort of like exposure therapy. But we're having major problems with it. This post is part first impressions and part asking if anyone else has experienced this and maybe has figured out solutions.

Now, my kid loves it, a lot. So it's not a complete flop, thankfully. But wow is it ever the opposite of smart. Kind of like how Google, Alexa, etc have "command phrases" to let them know you're wanting to talk to them, Loona has "hello Loona". But it only triggers listening mode like 20% of the time. Doesn't seem to matter if you talk slowly and enunciate or if you talk normal, it's just really bad at listening.

Even once you have it listening to you, it only recognizes your commands maybe half the time. The booklet it came with seems to say it sends audio to Amazon for voice to command translation, so I'm assuming it's bad at listening to commands because:

1. The microphone is mediocre and isn't picking up all the words correctly.
2. Amazon's public voice to command service isn't great for general use.
3. A little of both.

On the one hand, I get if you're looking to leverage existing technology and not reinvent the wheel. On the other hand, if it can't even detect "hello loona" locally, then everything it hears would go to Amazon. That terrifies me, given their privacy track record. It's also just plain frustrating to try getting it to play a game or go to sleep when it's constantly ignoring you.

Beyond that, it almost feels like the camera is for gimmicks rather than a functional component. It's constantly running into things like walls, chair legs, human legs... It's always running into you when you try to interact with it and it frequently moves violently; fast and without regard for its surroundings. I assume it makes no attempt to map out even just its immediate surroundings because of how it always runs into the same stuff over and over again.

And one feature I was looking forward to is that the robot is supposed to be capable of getting itself back to its charging dock, and yet not once has it ever attempted to do so. Not when it's low battery and not when we tell it to. But it also, for no great reason, assumes that it should just wake up when it finishes charging, so if you start charging it in the evening and forget to manually turn it off, the thing starts yelling and ramming into stuff in the middle of the night; it's insanity.

Anyway, I would not recommend it from personal experience. But if you have one or know someone that does, and you aren't having these issues, please share your wisdom with me.