The WEEDINATOR agricultural robot is one of the longer-running projects we’ve featured here on Hackaday. We first featured it way back in 2017 for that year’s Hackaday prize, and after a nearly a decade of work on-and-off it has hit a very important milestone: it is now an effective horticultural instrument, as you can see in the latest demo video below.
There have been some big changes over the years. For one, the scope of the project narrowed considerably with the adoption of a commercial tractor as the base, specifically an Iseki 321 . They picked the Iseki after examining several competitors, and it won out because its hydrostatic drive was best able to handle the very low speeds desired. It looks like they’re now focused on cultivation — that is, tearing out weeds mechanically — rather than the flame weeder they started with. The cultivators are of the claw type, and has three claws powered via the tractor’s hydraulics for control in all three axis: X, Y and Z. Of course the project now leverages modern computer vision toolsets, using a combination of OpenCV and YOLO26n running on a Jetson Nano board. The robotics half of the equation is handled on an STM32 Nucleo.
Aside from being one of our longer-running submissions, we have to call out the team for being one of the very few — perhaps the only — to go to the effort of creating a theme song for their project. If you’ve only got a minute to see the robot run, you might as well look at the second video embedded below and give a listen.
While WEEDINATOR has got the most persistence, they’re not the only ones in the garden robot game. We’ve seen projects using everything from concentrated sunlight to precision-applied herbicides to clear unwanted plants over the years.
Promo video with theme song:
What about Global Village Construction Set? They developed open-source machinery to help kickstart civilisation development without relying on corporations such as Deere or Komatsu. Their stuff is widely used in Africa, India, China and other nations where people matter more than debt.
Here’s a link if anyone else is interested:
https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs
Looks like the entire project was apparently furloughed a decade ago or so, and it is close to impossible to find any sort of plan on the website.
The wiki sees about 10-20 updates a day. It’s maybe not as active as one’d hope, but it doesn’t look dead. The roadmap was updated in 2025 and describes $1M revenue and various activities.
“Perfect for small farmers, it wont hassle your sheep or lamas” … Love it !! Cant believe this is the only project on Hackaday to have it’s own custom sound track.
Don’t think it is the only one to have its own soundtrack, given the number of synth mods on here!
A new way to take over the Tri-State Area!
If I had a nickel for every time my sheep got hassled by an inator, I’d have two nickels but it’s weird that it happened twice right?
Twice in the same night?
Considering the theme song in that video I’m glad no one else has done one. And the visuals? Che Guevara? Come on…
Yeah, instead of using gritty sounding British rap singer they should have gone down the more accessible Simon and Garfunkel route IMO. And, Mahatma Gandhi would have been a better revolutionary icon considering it’s about peaceable farming and not over throwing corrupt governments. Opportunities were sadly missed here. Otherwise, a good project.
There’s no accounting for taste, so we chose just to give “A for effort” and not comment on the execution. It’s likely just as many will love as hate it.
Sure, but does not everybody (100%) like Simon and Garfunkel? Never met anyone who hates them, yet. Met plenty of people who dont like hip hop though – mostly older people, mind you.
I think rap ‘artists’ should stick to ranting about life in the inner city ghettos, the money they make from selling drugs, their inter gang violence, glorification of misogyny, etc, etc and stay away from agricultural robots.
We did consider using a different backing track here: https://post-man-pat.bandcamp.com/track/the-machine . Sadly, Simon and Garfunkel weren’t available.
Idk I kind of want to hear farmer rap now
Yeah that portrait of Che exceeded its sell-by date like 30 years ago
I think a quick montage of more recent revolutionary figures would have been better – Nelson Mandela, Lech Wałęsa, Malcolm X etc. Not that the WEEDINATOR is anything close to those guys – but who knows? It’s early days yet.