Open Source Agriculture Equipment Proposal
As of 2018, OSE and collaborators have prototyped several dozen tractors and heavy machines related to agriculture. The highlight of this includes hydraulc, DIY, low cost, 3000 lb tracked drive torque systems acheved at $500 per set. These can be manufactured using common off the shelf parts. We all produce modular, 18 hp hydraulic power units at $1k material costs, which are stackable up to a practical limit of about 180 hp.
Based on these results, we are taking our agriculture equipment to widespread replication. The strategy is to use the OSE modular part library in FreeCAD to iterate and develop these to commercialization. We will do this via an incentive challenge, at a budget of $1M for 15 full time developers and 5 marketers for a period of 6 months to publish Incentive Challenge specifications, $100k to prototype the winning designs, and $100k for 2 years of project management, and $60k for one year of product management, and $40k for the immersion training of 4 OSE Fellows. All designs will be produced using 100% open source tool chains, with $100k dedicated to tool chain development of a design workbench in FreeCAD. The total 1.4M budget is for a 3 year duration, with the primary focus of year 1 being recruiting, year 2 being development And training, and year 3 being deployment and testing.
The outcomes are product grade designs for scalable tractors and equipment at the 16-180 hp scale:
- 16 hp Microtractor with steel tracks
- 16 hp Microtractor with rubber sprocket tracks
- 16 hp Microtractor with 3D printed wheels
- 32 hp microtractor
- 64 hp tractor, tracked
- 64 hp tractor with 3D printed rubber wheels
- 128 hp bulldozer platform
- Materials handling bucket for bulldozer
- 6 way bulldozer blade
- ROS autonomous tractor electronics retrofittable to any tractor
- Drive test platform for rapid iteration of mechanical/electronics integration
- Microtrac attachments - backhoe