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I have also had that idea. Instead of giant machines only capable of harvesting monocultures, couldn't we downscale to small, autonomous vehicles that can farm efficiently on a vegetable garden at scale. Many cheap drones to farm the way our ancestors did using manual labour

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That would be quite the change. In fact, it could enable many people to produce a lot on their own land, because they don't have to spend all the time doing it.

The sound is a problem in this plan. Bees are very sensitive to vibration. They would probably desert any cultured place with drones working continously. Can be avoided if you schedule the drone work, but must be adressed.

For any homesized plot the drone don't have to work all that much, and some of it can probably be done by night. Still something to keep in mind.

I wonder what the range of their sensitivity would be, for various scenarios.

If you have a bot passing through every couple of days, would they continue to visit the rest of the field where the bot is not currently present?

Very interesting factor to consider and be concerned about.

There's a few indie projects out there now that automate veggie-patch-scale farming. They more often use a large pick-and-place type system than a small rover, though.

(Example: FarmBot https://farmbot.io/ )

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