As someone who does farming (part time), I don't see these being practical. For low value bulk crops (corn, wheat, soybeans) the robot is too expensive and existing mechanization is too good. Even for high value stuff (grapes and other fruit) it will be too expensive. Maybe inside a highly controlled greenhouse this will be practical, but there are no food crops that are economical to grow inside a greenhouse. (It is getting there as high-tunnel becomes cheaper to install.)<p>As an aside, mechanical harvesters for grapes are hilarious. You still need people to run them. One person's job is to find and remove possums from the fruit bin before the critter is buried by a thousand pounds of fruit.<p>It is a distraction to talk about the gantry, XY or radial. Any gantry based system is going to be a headache from the start because you've got those rails cluttering up the space. Eventually you'll find something the robot cannot do and then you'll be trying to figure out how to get your general purpose tractor around without crushing the gantry.<p>The radial system is cute, except now your installation and operating costs scale linearly with the amount of crops. With an XY system, one can plant more and extend the rails and have the existing robots do more work. Not possible with the radial system, unless you are going to physically pick up and move the units between circles few times each day. If time is tight (plague of locusts coming in tomorrow, need more robots to squish them) you can increase the robot density by sliding more robots onto the XY gantry. Not possible with radial.<p>Ultimately it will be about the vision processing and manipulators. And then you might as well mount the vision/manipulator unit on a tractor and have a robot-tractor drive up and down the fields, just like any other piece of equipment. Vastly cheaper and more flexible than gantries.<p>Eventually we will get there, but it probably won't be until vision processing and lidar gets a whole lot cheaper. We might be on the cusp though, based on the computer vision advances in video gaming.<p>User roryaronson, I've done a lot with robotics and outdoor electronics too. If you want I can give you a fairly lengthy piece of constructive critism about your whitepaper. You've got a lot of good ideas in there, but just as much misinformation.