You know what’s going on, you are just wandering in the yard and there is not enough time in the day. It is really troublesome to weed the lawn. Then an idea suddenly appeared in your mind. How do we connect the gas-powered flamethrower to the robotic arm, drive it on the base of the tank crawler robot, and let it run autonomously with the AI brain? Yes, this sounds like a good idea. Let us do this. so, [Dave Niewinski] Exactly this way The ultimate weeding robot.
Do you think the robot overlord might take a more subtle approach, taking over the world one coffee machine at a time? No, it is directly used in a fully autonomous flamethrower.
This build uses Kinova Robot 3rd Generation Six-axis arm, mounted on a Agile-X robot Bunker base.Control is through a Connect Tech Rudi-NX box It contains an Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX Edge AI computing engine. Wow, that’s a bite!
The connection from the controller to the base is through CAN bus, But, unfortunately, there is no mention of how the robot arm controller is connected. At least this particular model is equipped with an effector-mounted camera system, which can be directly input to Jetson, which simplifies the construction to some extent.
To start the software aspect, [Dave] While walking on the lawn, I took a video with my mobile phone.Next he used RoboFlow Highlight still images of images containing weeds, which in turn are used to help train the visual AI system.The actual AI training is written in Python Google cooperation, Which itself is based on the awesome Jupyter Notebook (see also Jupyter Lab on the main siteIf you haven’t tried it, if you do any data science, you will blame yourself for not doing so! ) The Collaboratory itself is not that useful, except that it gives you direct, free GPU access through the cloud, so you can use it for AI workloads without having to install fancy (currently hard to get) GPUs on your desktop hardware.
The details of the hardware may be a bit sparse, but at least the required software can be found on it Weed Robot GitHubIn any case, most of us will not have this exact hardware. For a more complete description of this scary device, please check the video after the break.