One for my lawn please.
Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
421–430 of 483 posts
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#422Robots will eventually kill bugs too. Once they get small enough, homes will one day have insect-sized robots in the walls preventing termite and other insect infestations. But maybe without lasers.
It's difficult to prove you wrong. It takes forever to do so.
Nature demonstrates that very small machines are possible. We just haven't learned how to build them yet.
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#423I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned it yet, but I don't see it in the thread anywhere.
Have they mentioned its safety around animals? Presumably a neural network would identify most mammals properly, but what about an insect? Could a praying mantis be lumped in as a weed?
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#424Earlier 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.
If they were able to make drones work, it could open up more variable farm designs: rows are mostly necessary so that farms can be serviced by vehicles. Polyculture farming could become much more economically feasible if drones could weed out all non-whitelisted species. Would also be a great boon to forestry: would be awesome to make a bunch of drones to fly through forests and zap any non-native invasive species it…
> zap any non-native invasive species it sees
Given the climate change it could be the other way around. Zap some native saplings, which can no longer thrive.
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#425oh, by the way, we have some really horrible invasive species that need eradicating as well. . .
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#426Earlier 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.
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.
For vehicles, crops yes, animal husbandry often roads get you to parts of a property but are far from covering a property.
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#427Earlier 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.
Completely agree about flying: but I wonder about the wheel. A spider-carriage walking robot which could step around the valuable plants, climb steeper hills, and wouldn't dictate a row-and-plow approach to agriculture, that could be pretty compelling. Less soil compaction, more flexibility, could work inside forested regions as well. It has potential.
IMO; I think setting up lightweight aluminum rails, and run a framework of multi-purpose bots along that. Since the technology is getting lighter and lighter, it seems you could even do this and use LESS material than these gargantuan tractor/harvester/combine units. It may not even be necessary to plough fields anymore, when a smaller automated unit could just operate on the least amount of soil necessary for the plant to thrive.
Also: no more chemical weed killers.
Do this with bugs, and get rid of insecticides as well.
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#428Earlier 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.
agricultural drones run on gasoline and have plenty of energy
gasoline? I'm thinking ethanol derived from fermentation of the parts of the plant that were not shipped to market.
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that's right, and I didn't think of it. But besides what the sibling comments pointed out, that's an issue with any kind of weeding, including manual. The answer is to select according to a wide range of criteria, and not rely on a single one. That way, weeds cannot progressively acquire resistance, and need to check all the boxes at once, which makes it highly unlikely that they will pass on their "slightly be…
This is the part where Monsanto starts engineering crops to fluoresce in a particular frequency of light, so you can target weeds inversely.
That makes me think that this also makes crop-rotation obsolete. You can plant 20 different crops in the same field, in repeating sequence. The bot will take care of them as-needed, and next season, move everything down one slot.
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#430Given 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 prediction, this thing will be built into pivots. Most farms irrigate with a giant automated system that sweeps around the field in regular intervals. These weed death lasers could be integrated to the base of the system and ran from the same power that moves the pivot. Since these things don't move all that fast, you could have a central track and move the killer box up and down the line.
yes, this seems like a natural progression.