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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]

#21

Post by ajpgrealish »

modeless wrote: post #12

Seems 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 o…

Small Robot Company have a robot called Dick which uses "Non-Chemical Weeding", i.e. they zap the weed to kill it, and it's root. They use other small robots to do the mapping and planting. I really like the idea of small, specialised robots for different tasks.

https://www.smallrobotcompany.com/weed-killing

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#23

Post by danielheath »

ajpgrealish wrote: post #21
modeless wrote: post #12

Seems 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 o…

Small Robot Company have a robot called Dick which uses "Non-Chemical Weeding", i.e. they zap the weed to kill it, and it's root. They use other small robots to do the mapping and planting. I really like the idea of small, specialised robots for different tasks. https://www.smallrobotcompany.com/weed-killing

Weed zapping is fascinating - but putting the kind of power electronics required to deliver sufficient voltage in a mobile robot is terrifying from an OHSA perspective.

One group I'm familiar with are using 50kv (and "more than enough" amps) for the purpose.

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#24

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #18
Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, thanks for that fact!

>It is possible that rye traveled west from Asia Minor as a minor admixture in wheat (possibly as a result of Vavilovian mimicry), and was only later cultivated in its own right.[0]

Also found this about rye while looking that up:

>Recently, scholars have discovered that rye, more than other domesticated crops has followed a weedy species type of domestication process--from wild to weed to crop and then back to weed again.[1]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rye

[1]https://www.thoughtco.com/rye-the-domestication-history-4092...

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#26

Post by cwkoss »

abstractbill wrote: post #10
bamboozled wrote: post #5

Weeds 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 ?

As the video points out (toward the end), since these robots recognize and work on each individual plant, they are much more able to deal with more biodiversity than our current methods, which can only scale for monocrops.

Would be super cool to have an autonomous robot that could get a 'kill list' and destroy every invasive plant in an area while leaving everything else unharmed.

Could be a fantastic diversity-enabling tool.

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#27

Post by geraneum »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #2

Love 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.

It's natural selection and perhaps it's more likely that they will go extinct in such a scenario.

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#28

Post by cwkoss »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #2

Love 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.

There is a plant that mimics the shapes of other leaves - even if the leaves are made out of plastic. Pretty fascinating, the same photoreceptors suspected to enable this have been found in other plants, but the others don't use it to engage in mimicry.

Weeds adapting to look like non-weeds is highly plausible, IMO.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/#:~:tex....

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#29

Post by ALittleLight »

One thought I had while watching that the video didn't seem to explore is that if you can precisely map the field and remember every plant, and you have 4 million plants on your field, then it seems like you could enable precise experiments. Need to find the best mix for fertilizer or pesticides? Seems like you could do very precise and large N experiments to nail down what is best for your plants in your field and possibly eke out some additional return by doing so.

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#30

Post by nemo »

bamboozled wrote: post #5

Weeds 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 ?

On the one hand, the reason for the decline of the various milkweed butterflies appears largely to be a result of areas that once supported some milkweed populations were hit with glyphosate which killed the host plants off at a massive scale. On the other hand this is already happening with chemicals sprayed indiscriminately, this reduces the amount that's sprayed, which could save farmers money, and this reduces glyphosate runoff which is good. Still seems to have the down side that if actually adopted would likely cause even more loss since it could be used on crops where it's avoided now. And no farmer is going to program it to skip milkweed or some other important host plants, they hate milkweed.
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