291–300 of 483 posts
It's all fun and games until the selection pressure evolves weeds that say "human" on their leaves to fool the AI.
I know this is supposed to be a joke, but come on. In what possible world would this ever happen? They're not dragging this over people lying down in a field and I doubt the technology is even made to not target humans because they're never in target range.
Typographic ML attacks work and are pretty funny.
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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.
If they were able to make drones work, it could open up more variable farm designs: rows are mostly necessary so that farms can be serviced by vehicles. 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…
Sure, but the weedkiller isn't the only vehicle that needs to work on the farm. I don't think flying drones are going to be ploughing any time soon.
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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.
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Thanks for the info! > But some weeds, like invasive blackberries here in the Pacific Northwest, are extremely resilient and will shrug off defoliation. How does that work? I thought all plants (by definition?) need photosynthesis to stay alive in non-dormant states. Do blackberry plants have some way of getting energy other than photosynthesis in their leaves?
They grow these enormous and very resilient root balls under ground. I was taught that the most efficient way to kill a blackberry bush was to remove the structure above ground, locate a central stalk that leads under ground, and stick the end in kerosene or gasoline I don't remember which. That gets sucked up into the root ball and kills the plant. Never done it myself, mind.
Can we talk about the industrial design of this thing for a moment? It looks like something out of Simon Stålenhag. I don't know whether to be excited or terrified.
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> 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.
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We have an upland prairie which is a vanishing ecosystem which we are conserving. It’s fairly steep. We don’t have sheep but maybe someday we’ll get some. Until then, mowing is a way to keep it healthy and free of invasive plants.
Is mowing really any less work than pulling weeds by hand? Keep in mind that insects need habitat, too, and tall grasses are key for them. Mowing obliterates insects.
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The advantage with tractor-pulled is lower cost and higher reliability. The propulsion, guidance, and power-supply problem has been dealt with by industry already and is already owned by the farmer. The autonomous weeding machine will undoubtedly have issues with these three functions, which means down-time and cost. The machine would be cheaper if tractor-pulled, and the developers could focus on the problem at hand…
100% agree and that's what my original comment was trying to get at. I can see selling two models, one autonomous, one three point hitch / PTO. The advantage of the latter is clear to me. But then the product starts to look a lot less sci-fi, doesn't it? We already have pull-behind weed burners that use propane torches and not lasers. The only "magic" would be in the AI recognition systems (which I have questions abo…
Fully agreed about the 3-point comment though. Why take on building an autonomous tractor AND a targeted weed-killer, rather than tackling the differentiating problem only? Seems like a hype train measure. Or the systems integration is very important, in which case a partnership would be the obvious route or white-labeling an autonomous tractor. Regardless, this strategy seems very weird to me too.
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Is mowing really any less work than pulling weeds by hand? Keep in mind that insects need habitat, too, and tall grasses are key for them. Mowing obliterates insects.
when i was in HS i worked on one of those crews you see mowing highways and state parks (super good money for a teen but man it was hard work). Mowing on a slope with a large tractor can be very dangerous because you can tip over. Automating away the danger to a human may be worth the effort in its own right.
Robots will eventually kill bugs too. Once they get small enough, homes will one day have insect-sized robots in the walls preventing termite and other insect infestations. But maybe without lasers.