Robotics for Gardening and Farming: A Guide to Two Recent Series

Over the past weeks, I've written two series of posts, the first titled "Biological Agriculture for Roboticists" and the second "Robotics for Gardeners and Farmers", with the intention of helping to bridge the gap between these occupations and those engaged in them. What appears below is a table of contents for those series.

Biological Agriculture for Roboticists

Part 1

• Cultivation
• Soil
• Fertilizer
• Herbicide
• Pesticide
• Fungicide
• Biological Control
• Polyculture
• Crop Rotation
• Permaculture

Part 2

• Vegetative Reproduction
• Plant Propagation
• Aquaculture
• Hydroponics & Aeroponics
• Aquaponics

Part 3

• Loss of Soil & Fertility and Population Growth
• Malnutrition
• Countertrends
• Indoor Farming
• Scalability of Agricultural Methods
• Temptation to use Gross Methods
• Need for Appropriate Equipment
• One-way Scalability
• Impacts on Bottom Line for Farmers
• Eventual Inevitability
• Benefits to Small Farmers
• Benefits to Plant Breeders

Part 4

• Erosion Control
• Weeding Recently Tilled Fields
• Increasing Precision
• Weeding Pastures
• Weeding Planted Fields
• Suppressing Weed Seedlings
• Weeds with Tenacious Roots

Part 5

• Distinguishing Plant Types
• Rare & Endangered Species
• Benign Native Species
• Challenges in Distinguishing Plant Types
• When in Doubt Do Nothing
• The Centrality of Location
• Using Imagery
• Other Sensory Modes
• Sensor Fusion

Part 6

• Mixing Grazers and Browsers
• Unpalatable Leftovers
• Dealing with Low Growing Weeds
• Using a Rotary Rasp for Uprooting
• Using Sound
• Sonar
• Sound Produced by Animals
• Sound as an Effector Modality
• Listening to Plants
• Research Opportunities

Robotics for Gardeners and Farmers

Part 1

• What's Your Wish List?
• What's Achievable Now?
• What is a Drone?
• Tiny Drones
• Simple Sensors
• Program (noun and verb)
• What is Automation?
• What is a Robot?
• What is Robotics?

Part 2

• Why Bother with Tinkering?
• What is a "Bit"?
• What is a Signal?
• What is a Clock Signal?
• Serial vs. Parallel
• Driving Progress through Social Networking

Part 3

• Serial Ports & Protocols
• Binary Logic
• Bit Shift Operations
• Integers & Integer Arithmetic
• Floating Point Numbers & Arithmetic
• Machine Code
• Processing Cores
• GPUs & General Purpose Programming Using Them

Part 4

• Registers, Memory, Address Spaces, & Cache
• Analog/Digital Conversion & GPIO
• Assembler Language
• Higher Level Languages
• Operating Systems

Part 5

• Vendors & Helpful Websites
• YouTube Channels
• The Arduino Platform
• The Raspberry Pi Platform
• Technological Ecosystems

Part 6

• What It's Like To Be A Computer
• The Role of Sensory Hardware
• A Simple Robotic Project
• Even Simpler Mechanical Device
• Determining Location
• Using GPS
• Higher Precision Localization
• Rail & Gantry Systems
• Soil Moisture & Networked Sensors
• Proximity Sensing
• Other Sensor Modalities & What All Have in Common
• Afterword