Hello Pilots!
I stumbled upon a video by @Yuri_Rage showing his autonomous GNSS-positioned lawn mower. My Dad - a dairy farmer - spends an hour each day scraping manure in the free range enclosure using a tractor and in some narrow areas even with a manual scraper.
What’s your opinion on building a manure scraper / collector (like Lely’s Discovery Collector) based on Ardupilot:
- Is it feasible considering the current stage of development of Ardupilot and available code/hardware?
- What platform, mode, sensors* and drives are recommended for such a robot?
*Regarding sensors:
- a big part of the free range enclosure to be cleaned is not well covered by satellite signals.
- There are concrete walls and roofs all over the place.
- There’s actually even a connected indoor area that would be nice to be scraped autonomously too.
- Cows are walking / standing in the area during the scraping process.
- Ideally the scraper should also work when it’s raining.
My background is mechanical engineering so everything from CAD through mechanical assembly won’t cause much trouble. I’d use OnShape as a CAD so all designs could be used by others.
Since 2020 we’re using AgOpenGPS to steer our main tractor in the field for seeding etc. So I’m familiar with the u-blox F9P receiver both in a dual receiver setup and single with BNO085 IMU.
What I’m least familiar with is coding. I’ve changed some lines of Arduino code and from uni I know R but haven’t dealt with ROS or stuff like that.
Looking forward to hearing some opinions! Cheers, Andi