Just waiting for the day when the robot decides we are also a weed.
Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
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Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#12Seems like it should hoe each weed instead of spraying it. I guess that's a little harder to do. Maybe a lot harder.
Two other things I thought were interesting in the video. One, the idea of mapping the whole field is pretty cool. There must be useful things you could do with a millimeter-scale 3D map of an entire field. Two, this is happening in California, just a few hours' drive from Silicon Valley. I hope some of the engineers laid off recently find work in ag tech, because there will be huge opportunities coming with the rise of computer vision and (hopefully soon) robotics.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#13Love these types of advances though I wonder if weeds and pests will adapt to outwit the robot or if our ability to adapt automation to such changes simply will always/usually be too rapid for nature to keep up.
Well if the weeds adapt into corn to outwit the robot that wouldn't be too bad.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#14Love these types of advances though I wonder if weeds and pests will adapt to outwit the robot or if our ability to adapt automation to such changes simply will always/usually be too rapid for nature to keep up.
I don’t think there is anything a plant can realistically do to adapt to a high enough wattage laser burning it away in the seedling stage.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#15[deleted]
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#16Weeds are the enemy /s But really, the whole idea of having perfectly manicured fields like that with no sign of any weeds around seems like the real problem to me. Zero biodiversity…we wonder where the insects are going ?
There's "no sign of any weeds/zero biodiversity" and then there's "target the weeds that would crowd out your crop", which is definitely a problem in my raised beds.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#17There's another company called Carbon Robotics that uses lasers instead of weedkiller.
The attachment they built needed a custom cooling rig to deal with the dozens of lasers. Super interesting engineering going on with agtech.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#18Love these types of advances though I wonder if weeds and pests will adapt to outwit the robot or if our ability to adapt automation to such changes simply will always/usually be too rapid for nature to keep up.
Well if the weeds adapt into corn to outwit the robot that wouldn't be too bad.
Fun fact, that's sort of how we got Rye.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#19Weeds are the enemy /s But really, the whole idea of having perfectly manicured fields like that with no sign of any weeds around seems like the real problem to me. Zero biodiversity…we wonder where the insects are going ?
I picked up grains from a farm in Dwight, Illinois that makes very limited use of herbicides and pesticides (it seems like oats are all but impossible to grow economically without some use of a weed killing agent). The farmer made the transition for his health and the health of his kids, because he was intuiting that certain health problems were the result of agricultural chemicals. I was struck, walking in their corn field, by the abundance of insects and weeds, and the absence of these quantities in standard ag corn fields struck me as alarming.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#20Glad to hear that humans will be able to continue ruining the planet after the last bee dies