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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

#301

Post by eloff »

bri3d wrote: post #293
eloff wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Drones don't need to be battery operated - but, I agree that there is no reason to use them in fields which are already designed for vehicle access with semi-standardized dimensions.

If they're fuel powered drones, they need to refuel. Plus that's potentially expensive to operate depending how many you need and how heavy they are.

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

#302

Post by Animats »

This is only one of many smart weeders.[1] John Deere has "See and Spray". There's some unhappiness among farmers that this is tied to the "John Deere Operations Center", so the learning part is centralized and the machine is dependent upon a paid service.

[1] https://www.agriculture.com/technology/robotics/the-future-o...

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

#303

Post by justicezyx »

piyh wrote: post #81
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.

DJI has some demonstration of target pesticide spreading drone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfdWYztSqUI It's not as targeted as laser, and it has residual problem, and requires the crop to have resistance, or the pesticide/weedkiller to be specifically targeted.

But I think it might be possible to focus sunlight to generate energy to kill weeds, not through battery or generated electricity.

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

#304

Post by contingencies »

karol wrote: post #71

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…

It is very reasonable revisit the assumption that fighting nature in this way is a reasonable course of action.

We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them. - Einstein

There are some promising reports of enhanced agricultural outcomes from reduced inputs based on alternative strategies such as seedballs, dense intercropping, crop inter-rotation, less intense land use and higher biodiversity. Major issues with such approaches seem to be homogeneity (required by large scale distributors) and difficulties with autonomous harvesting or increased labour (increased yields are no good if you can't harvest them efficiently).

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

#305

Post by myself248 »

MayeulC wrote: post #161
sprainedankles wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd push back on that a little bit. I grew up on a farm that's still operating today, and it truly is difficult to find people to work those jobs. The farm pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more sporadic/seasonal. When harvest rolls around, farmers need to get the crop out of the groun…

> But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something very important: providing food. I'd love to take a break from my job once in a while to do some other, probably more manual work. I think everyone used to go back to the countryside to help with harvest during summer, bur I feel overspecialized these days. How about incentivizing companies to take…

Vocation Vacations.

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

#306

Post by tw04 »

foofoo55 wrote: post #241
tw04 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I don't follow what the advantage would be. Putting hours and wear/tear on a $250k tractor that you likely have other uses for in order to cut what? $10k off the price of this for the cummins motor and hydraulics? It would need power generation of some sort, so you'd be doing PTO off the tractor instead to drive a generator. I'd imagine the end result would be more fuel and in the long run more expense.

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…

>The advantage with tractor-pulled is lower cost and higher reliability.

Based on what? The cummins engine they're using is bulletproof and a rounding error in the cost of the unit. Hydraulic motors will run for 10s of thousands of hours without any maintenance beyond a fluid change.

People in this thread keep claiming tractors are fully autonomous, which model? If they aren't fully autonomous, what farmer is volunteering to spend hundreds to thousands of hours in their tractor doing nothing but putting along at 5mph stop-and-go while this thing zaps weeds?

https://www.protocol.com/john-deere-farming-ai-autonomous

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

#308

Post by riazrizvi »

burnished wrote: post #276
CoastalCoder wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure that is a one-stop permanent solution for a plant which grows back its leaves very quickly but the question is, how can the plant thrive enough to harm other crops if you defoliate it every day?

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

#309

Post by myself248 »

gpm wrote: post #50
retro64 wrote: post #26

This is very cool. Not knowing anything about it though it looks massive and overbuilt (with smallish wheels, but likely just fine for the time of year it's put to use). Anyone care to speculate why it needs such a large body? The width is a given because it needs to span the rows, but why a giant cube?

It sounds like it's got a generator on board, so it needs enough space for that. There's no sense letting it get rained on, so it needs some sort of cap (especially given that it's presumably electric high powered lasers). It doesn't seem to move fast enough to care about wind resistance. A cube is a nice easy shape to build... so why not a cube.

I hope future generations will be at least solar-hybrid if not entirely solar. It's not like the thing has any shade to contend with, after all, and most of its loads are electrical.

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

#310

Post by sidibe »

joosters wrote: post #38

"It's harder to find people to do that work every single year" Translation: The wages we pay are crap and we're not going to pay them more.

Manual weeding is really not a job people want to do in the developed world. IMO it's the worst part of farming in that requires working at ground level all day and needs to be done every couple weeks. It will wipe you out physically. Typically people who have to do this for long and have any other job available to them will switch even for a pay cut, but farmers can't really offer much because food production is low-margin (and in the USA they are competing with farms that use herbicides).
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