Live data from Hacker News

Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

freethink.com

401–410 of 483 posts

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

#401
post #393
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.

You caught me red handed. I have made explicit arguments elsewhere on HN before. It usually involves writing a lot of exposition, starting with identifying and deconstruction of the default paradigm that some people call “Value Extraction”. It can get very in involved.

This time, I was adding a subtle sarcasm, which I knew a small minority of HN readers will pick up. They are already familiar with food forests, restoration agriculture, and some may even be familiar with regenerative paradigms.

But let me see if I can condense this into something explicit:

Rather than eliminating everything but the monocrop, there are alternative forms of agriculture that takes advantage of the synergies that come from companion planting, “guilds”. Specific combination of plants planted together can be put together to reduce ecological invasions, or create an ecosystem that can produce harvestable food items for most of the year. Some combinations can mutually resist pests and diseases. Others can be combined to take advantage of vertical spaces (canopy layers), or to effectively modify the local hardiness and heat zones, or modify wind conditions.

Designing such a thing can get very complex. Some designs, however, become so resilient, they continue producing human-harvestable food despite being abandoned for over 150 years.

The Pacific Northwest is not the only region where indigenous people have used these practices. There is quite a bit of anthropological evidence that this is a wide spread practice ... what is novel with that article is that ecologists are acknowledging that this had happened in the Pacific NW.

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

#402

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'm not sure that "killer robots with lasers that can be field-trained to identify specific targets" would be quite the blessing that everyone seems to think.

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

#403
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.

The scene from Spies Like Us always comes to mind when bouncing lasers around. Or the Real Genius as well. So you better be careful using this around corn fields, or we know what can happen.

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

#404

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'm not sure that "killer robots with lasers that can be field-trained to identify specific targets" would be quite the blessing that everyone seems to think.

Why do your weeds have 2 eyes, a nose, and a mouth in all of the training libraries?

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

#405
post #401
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You caught me red handed. I have made explicit arguments elsewhere on HN before. It usually involves writing a lot of exposition, starting with identifying and deconstruction of the default paradigm that some people call “Value Extraction”. It can get very in involved. This time, I was adding a subtle sarcasm, which I knew a small minority of HN readers will pick up. They are already familiar with food forests, resto…

And to address the several commentors who say this technology is orthogonal to agricultural practices:

An alternative use of ML, CV, and robotics, might be something that can observe and identify all the participants in an ecosystem, such as food forest, and use ML to sketch out the possibility space in which viable cross species synergies can enhance an ecosystem. This could be used as an aid in designing a food forest.

One use of ML, accelerates ecological degeneration. A different use of ML accelerates ecological regeneration. I don’t think the latter involves a weed killing robot.

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

#406
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…

It’s not ridiculous at all, hours count. I haven’t looked at the article, but I’m assuming it’s the same machine, it’s a 10,000 pound unit with tiny little tires and a 75 hp diesel engine. It’s going to compact the soil, get stuck, and waste fuel driving around looking for weeds.

If sending a 20 pound gas drone with a 2 TB solid-state drive and 60 FPS 4K camera on it up and down the field for one 100th of the fuel consumption once a week saves 500 hours a year off that beast, it’d probably be worth it.

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume they mean "visible spectrum" when they say cameras, because that's what most off-the-shelf systems are tuned to. A spectrometer is a single pixel camera, I guess, but it isn't being used with imaging optics, and it isn't being used to stitch together a photograph. In a general case you could embed some version of GFP instead of glyphosate resistance. Then you can set the system loose (within the field, lol)…

Don't think there will be a need to bio-tag weed versus no weed. Current tech and sensors can probably get to 2-3 9s worth of accuracy (bonus, you don't care about accidently hitting/killing a false positive or two, there are many plants if this is a commodity crop)

I wonder if Monsanto seeds will start producing a signature that could be recognized. This will help in 2 ways. First, more easily identify those pesky farmers using their seeds without proper licensing. Second, help the machines know what plants to keep, and the ones to remove.

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

#408
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.

Heat-ray welding Tripods.

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

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about putting them on an electrified wire? String a grid of them over the fields for motion and for power. Power the grid with solar.

Wire is too expensive for that. You need thick wire to hold itself up without posts every few meters, which in turn means it is more expensive than the normal house wires. Not that it couldn't be done, but it is too expensive. Now there is opportunity to have one long wire that the tractor reels in/out as it makes passes. This isn't a flying drone, but that isn't really needed for anything other than cool.

No, wire gantry would be very much ok for this solution.

You don't need wires to be that rigid for that.

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

#410
post #301
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's probably something to be said for hard-wired drones here. The weight of the cable is something you have to contend with, but with a physical wire you can run a larger drone longer.
Post reply on HN