The Economic Reality of Agricultural Robotics and the Return of Widjets, Part 4 of 4

Which finally brings us to the topic of Widjets; here are the background references

• WIDJETS and LEGO-LOGO
• My Home Brew Robotics Project
• My Home Brew Robotics Project, Embedded Controller Based Peripheral Devices

Widjets first started out in the mid-1990s is a concept to compete with the STEM educational kit LEGO-LOGO. But that dream came to a slow and financially draining end. My wife and I had to learn the hard way that no matter how new and clever your idea might be, or how much better you think your concept is than any currently existing product on the market, if your idea doesn’t fit into the economic realities of the market you want to sell to, then it’s not going anywhere.

I posted about this chapter of my life here: • WIDJETS, A Postmortem.

In short, we did not understand how much the STEM grant process dictated which products would be considered eligible for purchase by schools and institutions, and which would not. And that, unless we made the extra and very costly effort to get into the STEM grant pipeline, our Widjets concept had no chance of commercial success. It’s this experience with my own startup venture that has left me sensitive on this subject; that is, the absolute necessity of paying attention to the question of its economic viability before trying to turn an idea into a business venture.

To make a long story short, when our personal financial resources for such a venture ran out, the Widjets project ceased and went into boxes on the shelf. The Widjets concept seemed an obvious one to me and therefore I always expected to see it rediscovered and developed independently by someone else who had the financial resources to play the STEM grant game. But the idea has never shown up commercially; no one seems to have landed on it. And because I’ve never seen anyone else develop it, I’ve never had a good excuse to just finally let it go. So, over the following years the project has gone on and off the shelf as time and life would permit me the opportunities to work on it.

But going back to 1995, almost as soon as I started working on Widjets, it became apparent that I had created a system of distributed intelligence, inter-connected by a common star-tiered serial interface, that could also be programmed by users not necessarily possessing a technical background. This was all of the three attributes a field-deployed robot would have to possess before it ever has a chance at commercial viability

The first two attributes listed above are hardware aspects and are solved problems as far as the Widjets design goes. But the third piece of the puzzle, the requirement that, however one ends up programming a field-deployed robot, it must be in a way that is accessible to those already working in the farming industry. That is, by a system of verbal programming commands.

So, starting with the existing Widjets component PCB’s as a development platform, the challenge for the next few months will be to see if this type of architecture will lend itself to some kind of verbal programming modality.

So here at the start of 2020, I’m retired, and I finally have the time to turn Widjets into a proper robot programming system