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Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

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441–450 of 483 posts

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

#441
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra 10 cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be life changing for farmers. But the market will always find the place where the work is unbearable and stop just shy of that.

> Yes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra 10 cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be life changing for farmers. You underestimate the percentage of the income some people spend on food. That's why agriculture is heavily subsidised.

I didn’t estimate that.

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

#442
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The cost would be acquiring a training data set that includes data from the more advanced sensor, versus existing catalogs with many millions of images and tens of thousands of species.

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

#443
post #254
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.

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.

Helium assisted drones could provide longer air time.

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

#444

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?

What? I'm telling an anecdote about blackberries over here. It's not commentary on the broader topic.

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

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah could be that as well, definitely some conventional ICE engines, not batteries

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

#447
post #81

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…

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.

When they can scale this down for home use, I think the market will want legs. A miniature Imperial Walker ambling around your garden zapping weeds would sell.

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

#448

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.

Any kind of wired setup would interfere with other tractors they use in the field. Fertilization, and eventually harvesting. I’m not sure why people are inventing more complicated solutions when this robot seems to handle the job quite well without them. It covers 20 acres in a day, you can likely keep 100+ acres weed free continuously without any other special gimmicks.

I think most people here don't run large farms, and actually want something for their garden.

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

#449
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I love the image of this in my head, but I can imagine in practice that many farms are not on flat terrain where there's direct line of sight [fire] for a central station to flash a lazer pulse. Perhaps if you had many smaller stations with these laser cannons spread about the field and each cannon would coordinate with the drone in the closest line of sight.

Pretty sure they're explicitly suggesting indirect fire, actually. Base station fires at mirror, and drone uses mirror to reflect laser to target. There might be stability problems, angle-at-which-it-hits-the-weed problems, and more-laser-scattering-due-to-longer-beam-path problems, but line of sight itself should be fine since the drone is up in the air.

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

#450
This is amazing, and I'm glad we're now starting to see the benefits of these startups and companies come to Ag.

I was in my last year of apprenticeship in Switzerland when New Holland was testing their autopilot planting system, something John Deere had already deployed, and it pretty much had to be corrected every few meteres. But the overall sentiment was that this tech is great, but is still a long way from becoming a reality. Having been in tech and from CA I knew that was partly true but that you cannot dismiss the rate of progress if bright minds and resources are coupled with determined and skilled workers.

I had access to one of those John Deere, it had a realtively comfortable cabin with a radio and seat warmers etc... but after seeing the sticker shock (500k CHF) I saw how they were closed sourced and had to be serviced by appointment only--the brother in law owned the nearby JD dealership in town. I never bothered to use them more than one or twice when the older manual tranmission and for more spartan Renault, Masey-Fugerson, Case, Fiat tractors weren't available or had to haul much larger cargo (100s of tons of potatos to the fulfillment depot, or take 20 cows out of pasture into the barn under 15 mins) due to snow storms.

With that said, this has unit has seemingly limited applications: as you can see this was done in the early phases of growth (looks like very early germination/sprouting) and while you can do this in later stages for things like greens and possibly tubers and other lower growth crops with spaces in between this won't work for things that like grains and corn which are much taller, more densely sowed and have thicker canopies and are what accounts of the most mono-crop and pesticide use outside of cotton.

It's amazing, and I hope we see more of this instead of smart phone 'innovation' but this is why I think rather than shoot for full autonomy in Ag we should just have equipment that can focus on the more menial and labor intesive things like weeding, planting, harvesting because the farmer will always need to be on sight for things like pH test, irrigation, nutrient fluctuations, changes in weather (hail, frost) etc... And have the farm manager be paid well, like 70K+ and that they get trained from an early stage in their careers to rely and use this kind of technology wherever possible and have direct feedback with technologists to direct them to other uses.

I advocated for this as much as I did for sustainability and renewable Ag when I was farming, and it was looked down on in the Biodyanmic community that relies on lots of 'woo' to mask that it's a back breaking, manual labor intensive job that is necessary to create a superior product and justify the +30% mark up in price.

This alone would free up so much more Human capital and allow one to do more of their time that can help sustain the business and help in creating auxiliary business models to support the core instead of focusing on weeding and lower yields due drops is soil fertility due to overuse of fertilizers and pesticides and a direct result due to lack of labor, which other than the ongoing water crisis, and climate change is the biggest issue for farmers in the Western/developed World.

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