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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

#391

Post by jmchuster »

le-mark wrote: post #113
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…

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.

That's what made sense for my company; we just identify the crop, and then churn up all the areas of dirt that are "not crop". Also, hey, free cultivation. Do it often enough, and your weeds never even get that large, which also greatly increases your identification accuracy.

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

#392

Post by NortySpock »

thruflo22 wrote: post #339
shepting wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the comment I came here for. 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 anythin…

RTK GPS is used as a second factor to vision in these machines. It’s just not good enough to target with as a sole / primary factor in the real world though. Bit of drift and whoops, $30,000 of crop gone. Lasers are not used because they’re expensive and dangerous. And Co2 lasers (as per the machine in the article) are powerful but super fragile. Water shooting around at high pressure is in no way efficient or easy t…

Thanks for posting this, very interesting. The linkedin profile pointed to a youtube video (unlisted) that was pretty interesting and covered how they could calculate eye safely using simple math that indicated the safe distance was 2 meters away. They appeared to be using blue LEDs at high intensity to char-or-inactivate weed photosynthesis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnL3zYhBlVs

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

#393

Post by 99_00 »

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-...

Why did you link to an article about pacific northwest indigenous forest gardens.

It seems like you are making an implied argument. Not stating your argument ensures it can't attacked. Not wanting your argument attacked suggests it is weak and won't stand up to scrutiny.

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

#395

Post by sushid »

linuxftw wrote: post #195
DennisP wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but it seems less dystopian than soaking vast fields with millions of pounds of neurotoxins, like we do today.

Those neurotoxins are perfectly safe. You can drink a cup of glyphosate and you'll be fine. There are no long term side effects, and sure the only studies are carried out by the manufacturer, but we know we can trust them. Sound crazy? Now, pretend it's an injection.

Then you drink a cup of glyphosate. Even folks on payroll spewing that nonsense would never entertain the thought of actually going through with it.

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

#396

Post by SubiculumCode »

thruflo22 wrote: post #339
shepting wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the comment I came here for. 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 anythin…

RTK GPS is used as a second factor to vision in these machines. It’s just not good enough to target with as a sole / primary factor in the real world though. Bit of drift and whoops, $30,000 of crop gone. Lasers are not used because they’re expensive and dangerous. And Co2 lasers (as per the machine in the article) are powerful but super fragile. Water shooting around at high pressure is in no way efficient or easy t…

Its like cabling or rails have never been used before to guide a machine along its intended path. Alternatively, markers could be placed at planting.

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

#397

Post by ceejayoz »

rossdavidh wrote: post #345
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?

They absolutely have, in various fashions. Try getting dandelions out of a lawn - miss a bit of the taproot and it’ll come right back.

Elsewhere on this thread is a great example of this in practice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry

> Seeds that are thrown the same distance as flax seeds have thus been selected for, making it near impossible to separate the seeds of these two species.

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

#398

Post by hosh »

ReadEvalPost wrote: post #382
jonas21 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yup, agreed. Speaking to others listening in: some weeds are edible, and other functions as part of ecological succession. We could be using farming practices that goes with that, rather than against it. Instead, industrial farming is optimized to produce single crops conforming to consumer expectations, cost-efficient harvesting, and durability for long transports and storage. Industrial farming is not optimized for nutritional value, freshness, and resilience against environmental stressors. The system by which 8 billion people are fed resembles a Ponzi scheme in which we are borrowing against future generations ... and with the increased variability in weather and water rights wars, it is only going to get more, not less, fragile.

Example is the dandelion. Besides having culinary and medicinal value, it acts as a pioneer species for depleted soil. Killing it with more roundup or zapping it with a laser, and then contaminating the land with more fertilizer will just encourage more dandelion growth. The land and ecosystem is signaling a fertility issue, and our present practices work against it.

I say this even though the common mallow is the bane of my existence here in the lower Sanoren ;-)

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

#399

Post by [deleted] »

hawski wrote: post #371
arrosenberg wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Indeed a good idea, but I would only hope it would have a reliable fail-safe, becaue it would be a little reverse GoldenEye.

[deleted]

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

#400

Post by IanCal »

delfinom wrote: post #225
Arrath wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would see the drones being used to help map weed concentration and optimize the route/efficiency of the weed killing robot, not using drones to kill the weeds. There are already solutions that use drone photogrammetry to map crop health, ground coverage and so on. It feels like a logical next step to use a drone to assist mapping the best route/find problem areas to target for the weed-roomba.

>I would see the drones being used to help map weed concentration and optimize the route/efficiency of the weed killing robot, not using drones to kill the weeds. That's a ridiculous solution to a non-existent problem. The robot literally has no rush to go to the weeds. It can crawl along the field by itself 24/7. Throw in a solar panel charging station and you literally have free energy for it to piss away. Instead…

That does depend on how much area it can cover per day.

If it covers all your land in under a day, sure. If not, then route planning may mean you can have one rather than two or more of these very expensive machines.

It's not a drasticly complex addition, and mapping weeds with drones appears to be a use of them already.

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