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Open-source purpose-built robots

Does the scout-and-treater weeding fleet still lose to inline robots when the machines are priced from published list prices?

research/osrobot-sourcedprices

Re-runs osrobot-deadlineloss with a Holybro X500 V2 drone (609 USD) and an AgileX Scout Mini (4,500 USD) at list price: pipeline over inline cost moves from 1.49 to 1.54 at 0.18 ha and 1.07 to 1.15 at 1.62 ha, ties at a 4,500 USD ground platform, and flips with an unsourced loaded flight time

6 tests

What it found

A stdlib re-run of osrobot-deadlineloss (16 equal fields, 2% yield loss per leaf stage late, Knezevic, Evans & Mainz 2003) with two list prices read on 2026-10-23 in place of round numbers: a Holybro X500 V2 PX4 kit (609 USD, no battery, 18 min hover) and an AgileX Scout Mini (4,500 USD). Pipeline over inline cost moves from 1.49 to 1.54 at 0.18 ha, 1.11 to 1.14 at 0.72 ha and 1.07 to 1.15 at 1.62 ha (8 h window, 2,000 USD/ha). At 1.62 ha and a 12 h window the fleets tie when the ground platform costs 4,500 USD. A 12 min loaded flight time raises the ratio by 0.12 and can flip the verdict. Not sourced and swept: battery, camera, weeding tool, inline-robot premium (0 or 1,500 USD) and loaded endurance; no weeding tool is priced for the treater, so both ground fleets are too cheap. Two retail prices; simulation only.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/osrobot-sourcedprices: breakeven
osrobot-sourcedprices/experiments/breakeven.svg, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

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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.