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.
“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.
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…