Sowbot is an open-hardware agricultural robot designed to eliminate the 18-month prototype gap that kills most agri-robotics startups and research projects. The system uses a stackable 10×10cm compute module with dual ARM Cortex-A55 SBCs — one for ROS 2 navigation and localization, another dedicated to vision and YOLO inference — connected via single ethernet cable.

Centimetre-level positioning comes from dual RTK GNSS receivers, with CAN bus for field communications and real-time motor control via ESP32 running Lizard firmware. Every component — schematics, PCB layouts, firmware — is released under open licenses. The software stack supports RoSys/Field Friend for rapid iteration or DevKit ROS for teams already in the ROS ecosystem.

The project aims to let labs in different countries reproduce experiments by sharing Docker images, eliminating the need to rebuild drivers, networking, safety watchdogs, and UI from scratch. Current status shows the Open Core brain largely fabricated, with two smaller dev platforms (Mini and Pico) in various testing stages. The full-size robot body has a detailed BOM but isn't yet assembled.