Happy First Day of Spring! If you’re in a northern lockdown state it is presumably time to think about gardening.
On a recent visit to Morikami, an enormous-by-Japanese-standards Japanese garden run by Palm Beach County (see Should Palm Beach be renamed Elba? for some background on the donor), it occurred to me that a great university robotics project would be an affordable machine that could maintain what stupid white people call a “Zen garden” (karesansui or “Japanese dry garden” is the correct term). It’s incredibly labor-intensive to pull out the leaves and re-rake the stones. Even in a country with open borders it would be very expensive to have a Zen garden at home that was maintained to a Japanese temple’s standard.
Here is a photo of the primary Morikami dry garden:
There are also some smaller areas and sections that use this material/technique:
The leaves need to be picked up a lot more frequently than the stones need to be re-raked, right? Does that mean that an aerial drone is required to pick up the leaves without disturbing the raking?
Using expensive industrial robots to rake the gravel has been done, but the video below shows them working in a leaf-free indoor environment:
What would it look like to build something that a consumer who wanted a backyard Zen garden could afford? With fat enough tires could the leaf removal be done without disturbing the raking? Or maybe if the raking is done by robot the right answer is to forget the drone and do a drive-around leaf removal and then re-rake every morning at 6 am.
This sounds like something out of a 90’s cyberpunk movie.
I’m not a Zen expert, but isn’t the contemplative raking a key part of the Zen garden experience? Wouldn’t this be the spiritual equivalent of hiring a kid from your local college’s crew team to come use your rowing machine? (Larry Ellison was famous for being into this kind of stuff; I wonder who raked his?)
If you just want something that merely looks like a zen garden, maybe use gravel binding resin to fix the stones in a “raked” position and you can use a leaf blower to blast debris off of it when it becomes unsightly. If you need something more dynamic, you can always get one of these: https://www.etsy.com/listing/921645810/automatic-zen-garden-sand-bowl-kinetic
Larry Ellison’s Oracle is still doing well? My company has a “Oracle-to-zero” policy… we try to get any Oracle software out of the company IT network… even the OracleOS.
Oracle is doing OK. Stock price is around 5 year – high. It is still used.
A smart enough routing algorithm could ensure that the robot always raked behind itself in the proper orientation.
Maybe take something like this https://philip.greenspun.com/research/tr1408/complete.pdf
but on this hardware: https://jalopnik.com/since-1997-a-man-has-been-digging-out-his-basement-usi-5884800
I see the following products as part of the solution:
A Drone with AI that can recognize the shape of a leaf. Upon recognizing it, the drone arm extends and retrieves the leaf from the garden. The drone would fly high enough as to not blow the rocks around. Geofencing would determine the path the drone takes to scan for the leaves.
Pretty sure a leaf blower & machine vision could do it. Those of us without the $10 mil for a yard need a portable robot which draws on beaches. We need to convert still poses of Greenspun running into sand art.