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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

#341

Post by arrosenberg »

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.

Maybe very small drones with mirrors and cameras and a ground-based robotic tank with a laser cannon.

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

#342

Post by schoen »

hosh wrote: post #307

This sounds like a much more efficient way to practice monocropping, enhance fragility, and capture economic value by increasing dependence on non-local food sources. In other news: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/pacific-northwest-s-...

Elsewhere in this thread someone suggested the opposite. Presumably you could attempt to implement this either as "destroy all species other than C" or as "destroy only species W". I don't know how to think about which, if either, this approach is more suited to.

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

#343

Post by cmrdporcupine »

tw04 wrote: post #306
foofoo55 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 volunte…

Thousands... millions of farmers already putting along doing nothing but dragging a cultivator / sprayer / fertilizer spreader / bush hog / rototiller / weed badger / manure spreader etc. etc.

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

#344

Post by atat7024 »

joshuaissac wrote: post #134
stevespang wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates was already involved in a startup to radar identify and kill mosquitos with lasers . . . guess it did not go well.

It resulted in a prototype that apparently cost $50 per unit, but no retail product yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser

Are there massive amounts of retail products in, say, Africa?

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

#345

Post by rossdavidh »

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.

If that were possible, wouldn't it have already evolved that millenia ago in order to evade humans pulling it up by the roots?

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

#346

Post by chongli »

danbruc wrote: post #232
pitaj wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you raise the base cost of production in a low margin case like agriculture, then the price of the good must increase or they would be running at a loss.

Of course, but if everyone pays $1 more then the wages can increase by $10 assuming 10% of the population works in agriculture which still leaves them $9 better off. My point was just that a wage increase is not nullified by the price increase as long as not everyone is working in the fields.

if everyone pays $1 more

That’s a collective action problem. You can’t get everyone to pay $1 more. If your strawberries (for example) cost $1 more per pint then your sales will drop accordingly. It doesn’t matter if all strawberry farms agree to pay more to their strawberry pickers. You aren’t only competing against other strawberry farms, you’re competing against all other food. If strawberries are too expensive, people will eat candy or potato chips instead.

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

#347

Post by jonas21 »

hosh wrote: post #307

This sounds like a much more efficient way to practice monocropping, enhance fragility, and capture economic value by increasing dependence on non-local food sources. In other news: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/pacific-northwest-s-...

The use of this technology is orthogonal to whatever other issues you may have with modern agriculture.

Despite growth in organics, 99% of farmland in the U.S. is still conventional. Anything that reduces chemical herbicide usage on that farmland is a good thing.

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

#348

Post by colechristensen »

Way too small, slow, and expensive to compete with chemical weed management in all but the most expensive and manually intensive crops.

Burning leaves doesn’t reliably kill plants, if you don’t pull it out by the roots you’ll be getting those same weeds back in short order.

Certainly progress towards something, but a very expensive impractical step for most.

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

#349

Post by RHSeeger »

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…

My first thought was that ML-guided flying drones with laser weapons seems like it could be catastrophic is hacked. Imagine someone changed the drones to recognize humans (or, assuming the lasers can't hurt a human normally, the eyes of automobile drivers) as valid targets.
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