It's an all-terrain solar powered buggy with smart behavior around faults, GPS pathing, and four-wheel steering. Calling it a 'rover' for the time being is fair.
Yeah, but in the video on the website, it is not actually driving, nor have I found a video of it driving somewhere upon a second look.
But it is supposed to be only driving when the sun is shining, so maybe we have to wait till spring/summer?
I mean seriously? It surely is more efficient, to not waste solar energy by storing the energy in capacitors and not in batteries, but that means, it will stop whatever it is doing when a cloud comes and it will stay out and not make it to the shed again, when the sun does not come back.
I would rather have the solar panels somewhere else, or those on top of the rover just as a bonus and use batteries and focus on it to do useful things first.
edit: ok it is driving in the video at 8:25 for a few seconds
The solar is an experiment to see if we can build a system that reduces waste. Farms already rely on sun to operate and we want to see if we can build a farming system that does the same. This reduces waste as our super caps last a million charge cycles while lithium batteries only last a few thousand.
