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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

#431

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…

it'll probably end up being something like a gamma ray source; as probably the cheapest and most durable solution.

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

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I get it, needles are scary. You don't need to make stuff up to justify a completely rational fear of getting jabbed with a needle.

I'm not concerned about the needle, only what's coming through it, approved by an entirely captured regulatory body.

can't be any worse than what's potentially in your hamburger.

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

#433
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I imagine massive overuse on "pest" species. Mosquito eradication will be a high priority for such technology, but there will be people who modify it to eradicate everything that flies or crawls. Everything smaller than a cat, if they could. I think lasers for killing large animals (including us) will be prohibitively expensive for a long time to come, fingers crossed.

Unfortunately, you don't need that much power to permanently blind a human.

for that matter; microwaves cook us from the inside out at 100+ meters, and don't require very good aim.

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

#434
post #400

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. 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.

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

This assumes weeding is a time sensitive task, which I find very doubtful. Realistically covering your land area in a week is probably enough, but maybe that's much higher.

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

#435
post #413
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Rather than eliminating everything but the monocrop No one is suggesting this be done. Fanatical monocropists don't exist. Your argument is based on a false dichotomy. We can make monocrop farming more efficient and environmentally friendly (eliminate pesticides) while also exploring other systems.

I am not sure how you define monocropping, and so I will write what I think it is.

By “monocropping”, I am talking about planting a single cash crop on a plot of land. A farm may operate multiple crops, each on its own field. They might rotate crops with cover. Some might even interplant crops in rows, or even between plants (as cover). Each field is intended to grow and harvest a single cash crop. You don’t even want to different varieties of the same species close together because you want to ensure a consistent produce. Many restaurants demand consistency (easier to consistently produce dishes when ingredients are of consistent size and quality), and consumers have been conditioned to take a few varieties as representative. (Example: many consumers think of Roma tomatoes when they think of “tomato”).

The combines are designed to till, sow, and harvest in generally linear rows, for a single type of crop. The field is plowed in a way to be level, so that watering can be as uniform as possible. Soil amendments, such as fertilizer, is relatively simple to apply.

So as an example, an old Native American practice called the Three Sisters: corn, squash, and beans, can be planted together. These three crops, when planted together, includes a plant that will fix nitrogen (beans), as well as a ground cover (squash) that help retain moisture. The corn stalk functions as a trellise for the beans, and help shade it. Beans can be harvested early in the season, corn and squash later in the season, with squashes working well as a dense store of nutritional energy that will last through the winter. It also happens that there are lots of culinary dishes that also combines these three plants.

I know of no industrial farming practices or equipment that practices the Three Sister. Driving a harvesting tractor through there will destroy the squash, and probably the beans too.

There are other combinations such as, tomatoes and basil; strawberries and asparagus.

When I use companion planting in my garden, I noticed a few things. First, harvesting is more difficult. You have to be able to identify each plant. I had to look through the different canopy layers to see what is going on. But it was also my first attempt, and I think I can design it a lot better.

When done this way, yield are not as good for any single crop (if they don’t synergize on nitrogen fixing). But I also wonder if the total crop output across all harvestable plants are better.

That is just for annual crops. There is a similar practice that can done for perennial crops. This is what those “food gardens” mentioned in that article, though they are usually called “food forests” by enthusists.

One of the things about this method of farming is that it is intended to decentralize food production, letting the bulk of the food production be local, in order to reduce transportation. You can then grow varieties that taste better and are more nutritionally dense, instead of being bred for staying edible and transported by refrigeration. (I am looking at you, roma tomatoes and hothouse tomatoes).

During the years of international sanction, Cuba had to develop self-sufficiency with use of very little fertilizer (no oil imports), no gasoline driven farm equipment (no oil), and as little motorized transportation as possible. They used a variety of methods, some drawn from modern science and some drawn from older farming practices; but whatever it was, they could not simply use pesticides, fertilizers, or refrigeration.

https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/cubas-urban-farm...

https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...

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

#436
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.

Spoken like a true software engineer.

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

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, Africa's retail market was worth US$1.4tn in 2015.[1]

1. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/africas...

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

#438

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)

But if you add a bio-tag, you can make your system look like ED-209 and recreate this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYUnp-x0SDE

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

#439

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 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.

It wouldn’t even have to burn all the weeds on the first pass. It’s like the herbicidal equivalent of mark-and-sweep garbage collection.

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

#440
post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is that better than a wheeled drone dragging a giant orange extension cord behind it? I'm not sure that's a great idea either, but flying brings more problems than it solves in this problem space.

Given that the plants are on the ground, I imagine not sweeping over them with an extension cable would be an obvious advantage. Still, you could work with suspended powerlines as easily for the big-box drone as with tractors, which brings me to another (probably dumb) question: Why has nobody built a landline electric tractor?
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