Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

freethink.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 483 posts

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

#461

Post by visarga »

kickout wrote: post #326
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical parts have more ways to break. All of those rocks in the field are just waiting to crunch things up. How long will weeds live if they continuously get their foiliage removed? How about when part of the root (closest to the surface) is damaged/burned as well? I really don't know, but I imagine that if such a robot went out into the field many or most days, there wouldn't be much of an issue. The weeds would…

Correct and also you (should) benefit from the main cash crop outcompeting the weed, eventually. Just hope it doesn't go to seed before it dies

> cash crop outcompeting the weed

I thought weed was the cash crop. /s

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

#462

Post by visarga »

hosh wrote: post #405
hosh wrote: 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…

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 for…

I agree, ML is a tool that can be wielded in many ways. Another ML use would be to find new combinations of crops that work well together. We can have a "genetic algorithm" design gardens, with successful ideas being replicated in future gardens.

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

#464

Post by visarga »

jerf wrote: post #86
piyh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farming goes from broad selection against pests with chemicals to introducing a massive selection pressure towards biological mimicry and adversarial image attacks.

I wouldn't worry about it too much, for a couple of reasons. First, the evolution of the computational model is simply faster than biological evolution. The computation model is going to be inside biological evolution's (metaphorical) OODA loop. Humans are going to be helping, too, it's not like it's just going to be up to the deep learning algorithms on their own. Second, for most weed plants, they aren't just a cou…

> Evolution is OK at adapting current things to new uses, or doing a massively parallel search on what you can do with just a tweak to a gene

I think evolution over longer timespans is the algorithm that keeps giving. In a single run it created all life and current technology. Evolution is radically open-ended, and that's how it gets around deceptive search spaces.

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

#465

Post by propertymagnate »

hourislate wrote: post #335
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…

Open Source models don't need to be trained on weeds. They need to be trained on whatever product is being grown. Everything else can be zapped regardless of what kind of weed it is.

Sounds a lot safer to whitelist what can be zapped rather then blacklist what can't, no? I mean, this is a moving autonomous laser platform we're talking about.

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

#466

Post by bigbizisverywyz »

sushid wrote: post #395
linuxftw wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a video on youtube of a Monsanto lobbyist being challenged to do exactly that, quite funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM

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

#467

Post by throwaway09223 »

Minor49er wrote: post #184
throwaway09223 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The energy usage should be minimal - it doesn't take much power to burn a leaf. If you pull it behind a tractor, you need to hire someone to drive the tractor. This defeats the purpose of an autonomous weeding system.

> The energy usage should be minimal - it doesn't take much power to burn a leaf. This is certainly true for dry plants. If they're weeds, they're actively growing, so they are trapping a lot of moisture that could make it hard to burn. If the weeds are a problem, then they're going to be growing. Many weeds, too, will continue to grow, even if their leaves are damaged or removed.

I think we might be using different definitions of "burn." I mean burnt by radiation so it no longer photosynthesizes -- in some plants this can happen simply from overexposure to sunlight. It's not necessary to turn it to ash.

A machine continually damaging cotyledons in emerging seedlings would go a long way. That's part of the advantage of a continually running weed killer.

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

#468

Post by throwaway09223 »

MayeulC wrote: post #125
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…

I don't think you really need AI/CV if you have multispectral or full-spectrum imaging. Different species will have different absorption/emission at multiple wavelength. This makes it easy to identify crops, and seems to be commonly used for aerial imaging[1-3]. That kind of sensor is expensive though, and while you could probably do it for cheap with something like a DLP wheel (edit: or an array of different light e…

> Also, isn't this a fire hazard?

Unlikely. Heating a plant to kill it is considerably lower power than heating a plant to combust it and turn it to ash. It would also be trivial to add a water sprayer as part of the process.

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

#469

Post by kickout »

dylan604 wrote: post #407
kickout wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Monsanto.....doesn't exist anymore....Laughable people hate on Monsanto/Bayer for protecting their IP, but when big tech does it it's just good business

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

#470

Post by f6v »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #287
colinmhayes wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People would import food.

Its funny, I've lived most of my life not too far from fields growing food. But when I go to the grocery store, most of the produce there is imported. In 2019, California agriculture produced about $50B in receipts, with almost $22B in exports. Our water goes with those exports too.

> Our water goes with those exports too.

Now, that kind of nationalism is very uncalifornian.

Post reply on HN