weedinator test may 2026 01

I'm going to try and do a test of the basic reading functionality with this robot with its cultivator attachment on it. Today it's quite sunny which makes filming quite difficult and to introduce you to the touch screen. The new touch screen. Oh, look at that. So, let's just put the machine out of gear. It's safe. And restart the app. So, it picks up the waypoints it's going to use. Restart. Yes, let's restart. Oh, look at that. So, I don't know if you can see there's should be looking at 24 waypoints. Look at the accuracy. That's quite useful. 16 mm. Got various encoder readouts there. Real encoder, horizontal encoder on the instrument. Real encoders on the instrument as well. The drawbar encoder is on the drawbar. We've got an extendable drawbar which put it into auto mode here. Should help. There she goes. Just going to slowly get it into position on the bed before I turn the hydraulics on. It drives so lovely and slowly. It's fantastic. Absolutely brilliant. Look at that. I think it goes at something like 100 mm/s, which sounds really fast, but it's millimeters per second. Actually goes what's the speed of this at the moment? It's going up about 75 mm/s. Fantastic. It's what we want when we're testing machinery. Drive it really slowly. I wonder if I got the still on the front motor. So, whilst it's just edging onto the bar, use the multiplexer to engage the rear hydraulics. So, if I did that now, it should operate. Let's try running the claws. There she goes. Quite slow at the moment because the engine revs are quite slow. When it gets in position, I'll turn the revs up and get some speed on the claws. But yeah, everything's really nice and well controlled, which is really good. Let's stop the machine. There she goes. It's not actually on the bed properly yet because it takes a little bit of time for it to align. So, it's quite likely that started weeding now. We're going to whip up some crops. But we can start doing like a bit of a simulation. I don't want to destroy the crops. That's all. I know that the wheels aren't in position, but let's just speed it up to start with. We'll lower it down a little bit. And when I got a bit of confidence, I'll lower it down a bit more. I just don't want to destroy my lovely crops, which is what it's going to try and do. But mostly because I'm just trying to film it at the same time. It's just really hard. So, let's get that speed going nice and slowly. There she goes. Remember, this is literally the first test, so things are going to be awkward and I'm filming it. It's really difficult. So, I'm controlling the claw to get it in position. When I feel confident that I'm not going to just destroy the crops, I'll lower it down a bit. It's looking good. It's looking all right. So, let's try lowering it down a little bit. Bit close. It's in the soil a little bit. Let's ramp it up a bit as she goes. I don't even know if you can see this on film. Sunshine's so bright. It's not a good day filming. Right. So, I'm feeling a little bit more confident now. I'm going to lower it into the soil. Look at that. There she goes. It's weeding. Nice. There she goes. It's great. I don't have to control the steering. It's all the steering side of it. It's all working really well. So, you got centimeter precision on that steering, which is absolutely fantastic. So, it's quite deep in the soil. I think it's uprooting any weeds that are in there. It didn't even need weeding because these crops were only planted yesterday. But the whole idea this season is for this stuff to be literally a test bed. There it goes. I'm not adjusting it at all on the hydraulics. Maybe I'll just move that a little bit. It's claws. Even though they look quite kind of deadly, they don't really seem to bother the plants too much. They're not ripping the plants out even though, like I said, they were only planted yesterday. So, the roots aren't holding them in very much. So, it's good. It's not pulling any leaves off. I'm quite pleased with that. And the claws themselves are absolutely massively over engineered. They could do with a bit of like elasticity probably. They're like huge great big steel devices. So I could go a little bit deeper I guess because it's not actually weeding on the left hand side. So I think that would be good. So ultimately this would have or eventually this would have depth sensors on it so it actually sense the distance to the top of the soil. But yeah, I haven't got that far yet. That'll be like quite a way in the future probably. There we go. We've literally not taken a single leaf off the plants, which is great. It's gone a bit deep. That's okay. It's good to go. Is it going to rip the plant apart? No. It's great. And it's just like absolutely Oh, ended up at the end of the bed. So, I'm trying to raise the claws at the ground. There she goes. Here we are on the left hand side bed which is planted in April and the machine's ready to go I think. So look at the app.