281–290 of 483 posts
I don't get why all this ag tech has to be autonomous. Would it not also make sense as a trailer or header for a tractor?
Like most whiz bang farming tech it seems too clever (expensive) by half.
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?
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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.
Drones also have poor flight time to recharging time ratio. Which means you need more of them to get the job done. Farms are designed to be serviced by farm vehicles. A vehicle makes a lot of sense.
Polyculture farming could become much more economically feasible if drones could weed out all non-whitelisted species.
Would also be a great boon to forestry: would be awesome to make a bunch of drones to fly through forests and zap any non-native invasive species it sees.
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MS & Intellectual Ventures (2010) https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_z... Satisfying slowmo killshots near end :)
From what I've read, this technology is still very far away from practical deployment and the Intellectual Ventures company is notoriously scummy, greedy, and lawsuit happy. They won't let anyone else work on this so no one else is making progress.
Wonder if it would be possible to do a simplified 2D version in a window frame or something. Should also reduce the risk of burning someone's eyes out.
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It doesn’t need to recognize every possible weed species, just “crop of interest / not crop of interest”. A much simpler but still valuable task.
I wonder why it can't it be done via location? Where we planted, vs where we did not plant.
I had a professor in college who was building self-driving tractors and would come in every other week complaining about John Deere this, or Case that, trying to steal his business with more expensive solutions. It turns out you can use GPS for a rough location and a fancy $200 gyroscope for millimeter precision. Then just plant the seeds on an exact grid and you know that anything not on the grid is a weed.
And actually, his suggestion was to use high-pressure water jets to cut the weeds instead of lasers. It would/could be less energy-intensive.
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Raise the wages -> food prices rise. Rinse and repeat.
People would import food.
In 2019, California agriculture produced about $50B in receipts, with almost $22B in exports. Our water goes with those exports too.
What is that big unpainted aluminum box sticking out the front? Why is it sticking out the front? It makes the machine look like a prototype, not a production machine. Aren't they "for sale but sold out?"
The video section subtitled "The bedtop is scanned to detect weeds in realtime" https://youtu.be/vSPhhw-2ShI?t=58 is ...odd. The two camera shots on the left show just weeds (top) and just onions (bottom). One would expect the "before" camera to show both weeds and onions. The "after" camera shows only onions so the machine must be 100% effective. /s
In the same shot, the ground under the machine does not look like it has any onions and it looks like it has only a few weeds, many fewer than the "weeds" camera shows. You can see "sparks" where the machine is presumably lasering weeds, but there are many weeds under the machine that survive the "weeding".
The press release https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210413005415/en/Car... is oddly interesting too. Only one farmer is quoted. (Only one? I though the production machines were all sold out. Where are the other farmers who bought machines?) The quote is pretty specious and his qualifications to judge the machine is very vague "[he] has utilized Carbon Robotics’ technology on his farm." So he apparently does not own a production machine. "Utilized" is a very nebulous term - could mean he used it to weed his fields (mmmmm yeah) or the company used his field to run tests on the machine (seems more likely).
I love the summary quote of Mr. Johnson: "These robots work with a variety of crops, are autonomous and organic. The sky’s the limit.” Doe people actually talk that way? No farmer I know talks like that. Sounds to me like something a PR flak wrote.
Back to the original article... "Even farmers who can afford to buy the robot might not be able to get their hands on one for some time — Carbon Robotics has already sold out of the bots it had available for 2021 delivery." I'm guessing the number of bots it had available for 2021 delivery is zero, in which case the statement isn't quite a lie.
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From what I've read, this technology is still very far away from practical deployment and the Intellectual Ventures company is notoriously scummy, greedy, and lawsuit happy. They won't let anyone else work on this so no one else is making progress.
Aww, I really liked the demo too. Wonder if it would be possible to do a simplified 2D version in a window frame or something. Should also reduce the risk of burning someone's eyes out.