141–150 of 483 posts
If they can make it a little bit more robust, there would be a huge market for removing toxic plants. I was just quoted over $1000 to remove poison ivy from a 500 sq ft. wooded area of property. My satisfaction was not guaranteed.
Just buy or rent a goat. Those things love poison ivy.
Why use lasers when we can genetically engineer goats to hate the taste of corn/sorghum/wheat and love the taste of weeds?
If they can make it a little bit more robust, there would be a huge market for removing toxic plants. I was just quoted over $1000 to remove poison ivy from a 500 sq ft. wooded area of property. My satisfaction was not guaranteed.
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…
After all, this is what we did with chemical weedkillers.
If they can make it a little bit more robust, there would be a huge market for removing toxic plants. I was just quoted over $1000 to remove poison ivy from a 500 sq ft. wooded area of property. My satisfaction was not guaranteed.
I have a feeling that the creators might be wrongly assuming that we could evolve plants to thrive in extreme monocultures (no other plant or animal life). I suspect these efforts will be met with diminishing returns of a) seeing lower yields because plants don't need to compete for resources b) really hard to go beyond 99% of desired plant because of energy consumption c) weeds adapting to fool the AI and resemble d…
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.
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…
I don't think you really need AI/CV if you have multispectral or full-spectrum imaging. Different species will have different absorption/emission at multiple wavelength. This makes it easy to identify crops, and seems to be commonly used for aerial imaging[1-3]. That kind of sensor is expensive though, and while you could probably do it for cheap with something like a DLP wheel (edit: or an array of different light e…
...until they evolve to emit the same spectrum of light as the crops being harvested! Cuz you know that's going to happen.
Love seeing advances in this space. I have an 80 acre farm and I’m waiting for an autonomous slope mower. Question about this tech is, does it really kill weeds, or just defoliate them? Like, is this laser strong enough to get down to the roots, which are often very deep with weeds? If not, I’m wondering why lasers instead of something mechanical that can corkscrew down and tear up the entire root?
Is there a reason you need to mow your slope?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raise the wages -> food prices rise. Rinse and repeat.
No, the price increase will be much smaller than the wage increase because the wage increase only goes to the fraction of the population that does the work while the price increase applies to the entire population.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just buy or rent a goat. Those things love poison ivy.
Well now you've done it. Why use lasers when we can genetically engineer goats to hate the taste of corn/sorghum/wheat and love the taste of weeds?
Grazing animals would eat the weeds and naturally fertilizer the land. No harm if they don’t totally kill the weed, more food to fatten them up.