Is a scout drone plus a camera-less ground treater cheaper per hectare than one weeding robot, and from what field size?

What it found

A stdlib follow-up to osrobot-scoutpair that prices its matched-kill pair (scout at 1 m/s, 3 m swath, 0.343 killed) against one inline robot, with every price an assumed round number. Simulated time is linear in area (R² ≥ 0.9999 over 0.045 to 1.62 ha), so cost per field is a fixed set-up part plus a per-hectare part. Charging each machine only for the minutes it works, the pair costs about 2.5 times the inline robot on a 0.045 ha field, breaks even near 0.5 ha (0.8 ha at a 4,000 USD scout, 1.3 at 6,000) and is about 0.7 times as much per hectare at 5 ha (extrapolated). If the two machines are held for the whole job, as one dedicated pair would be, it never wins at the reference prices (1.08 times at 20 ha). The verdict flips with utilisation (2,000 occupied hours a year gives 2.09 times at 0.72 ha) and with labour and battery life. Stylised: assumed prices and constants, a straight-line extrapolation beyond 1.62 ha, no registration error or wind; nothing was built or flown.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

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Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1

Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.