May the Force of the Right Hardware be with you.

As the population increasingly moves towards tech jobs, there’s now a shortage of coconut harvesters in India, says the New Atlas. I strongly doubt that what any relevant percentage of former coconut harvesters have moved to, in India or everywhere else, is “tech jobs”, but that is not the point of this post.

As you can see in this photograph (check the original article for more!) the news is that some indian scientists have built “a tree-climbing coconut-harvesting robot, called Amaran, that could perhaps someday take up the slack”.

According to the article, Amaran must be manually assembled around the base of a tree, which it can then climb with eight rubber wheels. Once it reaches the coconuts, it can saw them off the branches. During the process, Amaran can be controlled with either a joystick, or a smartphone app.

Performance-wise, Amaran can climb trees inclined up to 30 degrees, as high as 15 meters, and be as productive overall as a human harvester.

From Amaran to Tatooine

In and by itself, the main advantages of something like Amaran are that it is tireless, and usable by almost everybody. If it becomes fully autonomous, it can work 24/7, that is be much more productive than a human being, that is make enough money to sustain a family that owns it. Besides, it would allow even disabled or ancient farmers, who cannot afford anymore to climb trees, to stay independent.

But the real potential of projects like Amaran, and the direction in which I hope they all move, is if they become Open Source, and focus on designs that can be manufactured locally, possibly with recycled materials.

If that became the norm, we could finally see farming like in Star Wars: a world were human-scale farming is possible, because advanced, digital, DIY open technologies have become really commonplace and affordable:

As I have said for a while now, both in Kerala and Europe, the part of Star Wars that really matters is now a concrete possibility for villagers worldwide: access to DIY harvesters, farming drones, greenhouses, micro-watering systems, pest mapping… with equipment that is community-designed, produced, owned and managed.

The real value of projects like Amaran is the possibility to move in that direction. Farming should be like in Star Wars.