[Dprglist] Seeing the RoboColumbus cones

[David Anderson]

Flame cultivator.  Awesome.  I googled "cotton farm flame cultivator" 
and came up with this:

https://flameengineering.com/pages/agricultural-flaming-guide

Invented by one Price McLemore in 1938.   Clever.  I want to see one in 
action!

cheers
dpa


On 12/05/2016 11:28 PM, John Swindle wrote:
> Dave,
>
> Great stuff. Thanks for setting me straight on the already-uniqueness 
> of the orange cones.
>
> But I'm still not making my point (largely because I'm still slowly 
> formulating it). At the same time, I get your point, which is: Go and 
> do it! But vision-related stuff is just not interesting for me to pursue.
>
> More of my point: It's not to look for, say, an orange cone, but to 
> look for, say, a plastic thing or a rubber thing or a wood (or 
> non-wood) thing. Unique in the arena and likely unique in a large 
> unconstrained space.
>
> My interest in this is to build a robot that weeds the yard. I suspect 
> that it is insufficient to look at leaf shapes, and I suspect that 
> different plants have other signatures that will be easier to detect, 
> as with the Earth sciences satellites that see what kind of trees are 
> in a forest.
>
> When I saw a root heater weed killer for sale (basically a soldering 
> iron on a stick), I got interested in having a gadget wander about the 
> yard, selectively cooking the roots of undesired plants. A vinegar 
> spray works also, but the root heater is more precise. (A flame 
> cultivator is more dramatic though. We had those on the cotton farm.)
>
> You say we often build stuff that is purpose-built to win an arbitrary 
> contest. In this case, I am looking for something that serves as a 
> sensor for something beyond color and shape differences. It would be 
> great if it involved sound! Talk to the weeds.
>
> I thought we developed sight for visible light because that's what 
> gets through the atmosphere. Water has a big impact on the atmosphere 
> as well.
>
> And so a UV sensor would be OK for a robot because it would either be 
> designed to not get burned up by UV, or we wouldn't care that the 
> sensor only lasted a few years. We try to anthropomorphize things too 
> much, building our own limitations into our creations.
>
> Good stuff. Back to slowly formulating now.
>
> John Swindle
>

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