GitHub: Agroecology-Lab/feldfreund_devkit_ros · forked from zauberzeug/feldfreund_devkit_ros
We’re building Sowbot, an open-hardware precision seeding and weeding robot targeting smallholder agroecological farms. The ROS 2 Jazzy stack is containerised and designed to be reproducible on affordable, open hardware. Collaborators welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.
The ROS stack is a fork of Zauberzeug’s Feldfreund DevKit, The WIP Sowbot hardware (chassis, end-effectors) is also fully open — see sowbot.co.uk.
Key upstream packages:
- LCAS topological_navigation (aoc_refactor) — graph-based navigation from Lincoln’s AgriOpenCore initiative. More appropriate for row-crop field patterns than a pure Nav2 global planner.
- Nav2 — local planning and costmaps, used via AOC edge actions rather than as the primary planner.
- fusioncore — UKF fusing RTK GNSS + wheel odometry + dual-antenna heading into
/fusion/odom. Also handles topic remapping between LCAS topo_nav and Nav2. - ublox_dgnss — dual u-blox F9P moving-base RTK driver. Centimetre positioning and heading vector.
- Fields2Cover — coverage path planning for the seeding pass; handles headland generation and row ordering.
- LCAS Sentor — topic/node health monitoring; publishes a heartbeat that gates autonomous motion.
- visual-multi-crop-row-navigation (Uni Bonn) — ExG + Otsu visual servoing for the weeding pass, running on a second SBC.
- Lizard DSL (by Zauberzeug) — ESP32 firmware abstraction for motor control and hardware safety, keeping hard-RT concerns off the main SBC entirely.
Active development, ROS 2 Jazzy, caatinga-dev branch. Happy to discuss integration or architecture, or get help with any of the myriad complexities.
We have a weekly call at 1pm UK and hang out on Discord a bit if that’s your bag: Personal Robotics
