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Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

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Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#81

Post by piyh »

motohagiography wrote: post #56

Given where ML and CV are today, I'd bet on open source models trained on weeds within 3-5 years. This company can scale, but their unit price is going to plummet. Also, it sounds like they're using cameras, where it's concievable that other future sensors could be more efficient. An iteration of this with higher resolution cameras and small flying drones seems like an intuitive next step. This is a super interesting…

Drones do not seem like a logical step for me. I'm not a laser expert, but seems like the energy storage needed to kill hundreds to thousands of something with light is heavier than flying would realistically allow. Wheels and tracks are what farming is built around, no need to literally reinvent the wheel here.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#85

Post by jmacd »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #44
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #20

I want to see details on power source and energy usage. That's where I'm a bit skeptical. To do the 20 acres they're talking about you'd need one hell of a huge battery, assuming it's electric. Even just to move the thing. Then add power draw for the laser on as well. Also seems odd to have it be something that is self-powered and autonomous rather than just something you pull behind a tractor on the three point hitc…

Farming equipment is typically fuel based. And this appears to be the case for this robot as well: it uses Diesel.

This is in no small part because of the massive subsidization of fuel for farming in most countries. Not only is the fuel for agriculture heavily discounted, but what you do pay can be written off against your revenues.

Same with most fisheries.

If governments want these sectors to go green, that is going to be a very big and painful band-aid to peel off.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#86

Post by jerf »

piyh wrote: post #46
ceejayoz wrote: post #2

It's all fun and games until the selection pressure evolves weeds that say "human" on their leaves to fool the AI.

Farming goes from broad selection against pests with chemicals to introducing a massive selection pressure towards biological mimicry and adversarial image attacks.

I wouldn't worry about it too much, for a couple of reasons.

First, the evolution of the computational model is simply faster than biological evolution. The computation model is going to be inside biological evolution's (metaphorical) OODA loop. Humans are going to be helping, too, it's not like it's just going to be up to the deep learning algorithms on their own.

Second, for most weed plants, they aren't just a couple of genes away from mimicking corn... they're probably dozens or hundreds of genes away from mimicking corn. Evolution is OK at adapting current things to new uses, or doing a massively-parallel search on what you can do with just a tweak to a gene, but if the task can't be done with one of those things, it just loses and the organism dies. Or, to put it another way, it's good at climbing slopes one step at a time, but if you present it with a cliff it just fails.

It's essentially the same reason why nothing has evolved a resistance to a human gardener yanking them physically out of the ground and leaving them to die on the concrete... it's not just a matter of tweaking a couple of genes for that. This robot presents an exceedingly harsh selection landscape for a weed.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#87

Post by ourmandave »

swiley wrote: post #70
motohagiography wrote: post #56

Given where ML and CV are today, I'd bet on open source models trained on weeds within 3-5 years. This company can scale, but their unit price is going to plummet. Also, it sounds like they're using cameras, where it's concievable that other future sensors could be more efficient. An iteration of this with higher resolution cameras and small flying drones seems like an intuitive next step. This is a super interesting…

Commodity drown with high powered laser for killing things based on image recognition sounds like sci-fi dystopia.

All roads lead to Skynet, some less obvious than others.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#88

Post by icegreentea2 »

hanniabu wrote: post #67
tw04 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also seems odd to have it be something that is self-powered and autonomous rather than just something you pull behind a tractor on the three point hitch That doesn't seem odd to me at all. The whole point of this thing is to let it run all day killing weeds while you do other stuff . The fact it only has a max of 5mph (and likely significantly slower when there are actual weeds to kill) means you would spend all day…

> The whole point of this thing is to let it run all day killing weeds while you do other stuff. There's a lot of automated tractors now

Yeah. But I wonder if putting it all in one was for better coupling between shooting laser control vs the whole cart moving around (for example, slowing down/stopping when the weed density goes up).

I noticed this thing uses hydraulic drive motors... I assume that was so they could run the engine as 'electrical first', but I also wonder if it gives them better start/stop control of the cart.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#90

Post by dkarl »

swiley wrote: post #70
motohagiography wrote: post #56

Given where ML and CV are today, I'd bet on open source models trained on weeds within 3-5 years. This company can scale, but their unit price is going to plummet. Also, it sounds like they're using cameras, where it's concievable that other future sensors could be more efficient. An iteration of this with higher resolution cameras and small flying drones seems like an intuitive next step. This is a super interesting…

Commodity drown with high powered laser for killing things based on image recognition sounds like sci-fi dystopia.

Yeah, I imagine massive overuse on "pest" species. Mosquito eradication will be a high priority for such technology, but there will be people who modify it to eradicate everything that flies or crawls. Everything smaller than a cat, if they could.

I think lasers for killing large animals (including us) will be prohibitively expensive for a long time to come, fingers crossed.

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