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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

#381

Post by danbruc »

chongli wrote: post #346
danbruc wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, p…

So it turn out that people or not willing to pay what it costs to produce strawberries at a wage level at which people are willing to do the hard work. That's fine. The farmer should try to lower the costs by automation or switch to producing potatoes for those potato chips.

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

#382

Post by ReadEvalPost »

jonas21 wrote: post #347
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.

The right way to farm is to work with other plants and the weeds themselves to regenerate the soil. The idea that weeds are pests that need to be eliminated at all costs is antithetical to proper regenerative farming. Anything that enables or propagates industrial farming is genuinely a bad thing that we should not support as technologists, it is not at all orthogonal! "A little bit less of a bad thing" still leaves us in a bad place.

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

#383

Post by tw04 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #343
tw04 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I assume you haven't farmed? You don't run any of those implements at 5mph with a 3-row spread. It would literally be impossible to run a modern farm at those speeds and spread.

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

#384

Post by sjburt »

MayeulC wrote: post #125
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…

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…

I think the AI solution is actually pretty well proven. I use PlantNet to identify weeds in my yard and it's plenty accurate and doesn't require any sort of advanced sensor.

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

#385

Post by MayeulC »

sjburt wrote: post #384
MayeulC wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the AI solution is actually pretty well proven. I use PlantNet to identify weeds in my yard and it's plenty accurate and doesn't require any sort of advanced sensor.

Could be, but having more discriminating data as an input can only improve speed and accuracy. I don't know what technology they picked for the first iteration, but can only imagine they'll end up using every trick in the book going forward.

A slightly more advanced sensor or lighting apparatus wouldn't cost much more, proportionately to the cost of the whole system.

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

#386

Post by kps »

riskable wrote: post #147
MayeulC wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This makes it easy to identify crops ...until they evolve to emit the same spectrum of light as the crops being harvested! Cuz you know that's going to happen.

We just need the weedbots to test plants for flavour and nutritional value; cf. xkcd.com/810

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

#387

Post by bartmika »

piyh wrote: post #46
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.

Farming goes from broad selection against pests with chemicals to introducing a massive selection pressure towards biological mimicry and adversarial image attacks.

You're missing another remarkable ability of nature - coevolved species with humans. In essence, they keep evolving until humans find a use for them in their lives (be it personal, medical, industrial, etc) and then end up caring/nurturing them. Or another way to phrase it: The weeds evolve so they don't compete with the crops the human grows.

A few examples come to mind:

- "Clovers" fix nitrogen in the ground, other plants can take that nitrogen from the ground, some gardeners now intentionally keep this weed to benefit the plants they are growing for crops. I think the term is called "rotating cover crop".

- "Comfrey" has incredibly long tap root which mines minerals and stores those in the leaves. Gardners/farms can plant comfrey, chop the entire top off, the decaying leaves release the minerals into the surface soil for the surround crop plants to utilize. Without comfrey, those minerals would of been locked away from the main crop. After the comfrey is cut, it grows back the leaves again and the gardener/farmer can repeat this cycle.

- Some weeds attract beneficial insects to the garden/farm and thus benefit the main crop. Wise gardener/farmer would keep these around. For example, more bees means more insect pollinated fruit to be grown.

The pattern with highly competitive specifies results in either extinction of one of the species or a mutual beneficial evolution. For example:

- "Bull horn Acacia tree" - Ants and the tree have co-evolved that in the present they are highly depend on each other for survival. In the history, at one point when the ants and tree were introduced the ants brought a lot of acacia tree destruction followed by ant death because of loss of food source - but over time the trees that benefited the ants got selected along with the ants that were compatible with the trees.

If you'd like to learn more on the topic of coevolved species, I recommend this 30 min video on the topic https://youtu.be/hCAvBmY7ZgA

I don't know what this robot will do, the story is being currently written so we will see what happens!

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

#388

Post by m463 »

arrosenberg wrote: post #341
piyh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or it could just fly upside down. maybe add wheels to set cutting height :)

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

#389

Post by sgtnoodle »

hu3 wrote: post #234
esrh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me that message implied weed recognition and marking with drones followed by destruction with the cube.

That's my understanding too but what about precision? Both the drone and the ground robot would need milimiter precision geolocation to coordinate otherwise the laser can miss the weed.

Unless you have a precise map of all the weed locations, precise location in absolute world coordinates doesn't seem too important. You'd need fairly precise and accurate relative positioning from tank to drone and drone to weed, though. Drone to weed could be done via camera (you need to detect the weed anyway), but tank to drone would likely be a difficult engineering problem.

A flying drone seems like the wrong way to solve the problem, though. For a drone close enough to the ground to reliably detect weeds, you'd likely need a multi-rotor, a slow flying fixed wing aircraft, or a blimp. A multirotor has a huge energy penalty, and a fixed wing aircraft or blimp loses the practical gains vs. just using a tractor of some sort.

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

#390

Post by throwaway41597 »

riazrizvi wrote: post #308
burnished wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If the crop is near a bush, then the plant can happily grow in the bush and send roots to the crop.
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