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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]

#71

Post by hydrox24 »

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…

Australia's CSIRO has a setup out at Boorowa[0] doing this kind of work. They're doing a lot of traditional research into monitoring and modelling technology, but also doing some neat digital twin style projects.

[0]: https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-us/industries/agriculture/...

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

#72

Post by CuriousCosmic »

worldsayshi wrote: post #69
fangorn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like we need a G.E.C.K.!

And G.E.C.K. kind of sounds like http://opensourceecology.org

Oh lovely. OSE is still doing good. I remember reading up on the project a decade or so ago back when it was basically just a wiki and a handful of engineers.

The project is pretty well thought out and extremely ambitious. I can only hope they continue to make good progress on it.

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

#73

Post by tomxor »

mastazi wrote: post #60

This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: > Imagine, a few years down the line, applying th…

> applying these principles to maintaining an edible polyculture ecosystem-farm

Yup, actually if you read between the edits toward the end of the video I think this is in the minds of those working on it, not sure why it wasn't focused on more, perhaps because it sounds less immediately practical... once the automation is somewhat intelligent, the need for a monoculture for viable large scale agriculture is diminished.

In fact at a certain point of sophistication, especially when harvesting a polyculture becomes viable, it will probably flip and become significantly more profitable long term to abandon monoculture... since the soil health will improve over time which also improves yields.

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

#74

Post by AOsborn »

mastazi wrote: post #60

This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: > Imagine, a few years down the line, applying th…

Absolutely, swarms make a lot of sense.

Also, the key difference between a 'hard' challenge like self-driving cars and something like self-sustaining agriculture is that the reliability doesn't need to be 100%. An achievable target could be something like 'one human to operate the location'. Things will break, software will glitch, maintenance will be required - but that will be OK, as long as the issues can be corrected in a reasonable length of time.

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

#75

Post by defrost »

For those interested Landline the Australian farming (stock, agriculture and related) weekly news roundup [1] has been reporting on Agri-bots and automated farming regular for the past five years (and since ~1980 if you allow the early reporting on the sheep shearing robot project at UWA) [2].

In the vision augmented weed spray domain (the subject of this posted video) there has been reporting on both heavy tractor dragged units (for covering entire 1,000+ acre farms) and, perhaps more interestingly, lightweight solar powered spray bots that have minimal soil impact and intermittent deployment patterns.

Weeds patch up and spotting initial patches from air drones and then deploying a light spray bot to target individual weeeds is effective in many ways; kill time before spread, fuel usage (solar), minimal total deployment, soil impact, etc.

[1] https://iview.abc.net.au/show/landline

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZAh2zv7TMM

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

#76

Post by worldsayshi »

mastazi wrote: post #60

This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: > Imagine, a few years down the line, applying th…

I feel like what you're describing is still in the realm of sci fi because of limitations in robot autonomy that we have expected to break through many times without success. If we succeed with autonomous driving we will probably succeed in these domains as well. As well as many other domains.

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

#77

Post by taberiand »

danielheath wrote: post #23
ajpgrealish wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe this is a false equivalence, but I think industrial scale leaching of poisons into the water supply is more terrifying and anything that can replace that is worth looking into.

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

#78

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

mastazi wrote: post #60

This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: > Imagine, a few years down the line, applying th…

I keep saying I want a laser on a turret that zaps cabbage moths, snails, japanese beetles, squash bugs. Do I need it? No... but it would reduce my labor and losses while increasing profit.

There's so much opportunity for improvement, but we need the R&D money and start-ups to be there too. Please, VCs, spend your money on these projects!

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

#79

Post by curiousgeorgio »

It's cool technology, but let's be careful here. If we've learned anything about technology in the past few years, it's that the benefits usually come with a host of new problems.

Cars, phones, and many critical pieces of infrastructure are quickly becoming impossible to service or fix by anyone but their manufacturers. Even normal operation relies on services that can be shut down which the flip of a remote switch. Not a huge problem in the individual case, but when our farming relies on similar technology, threats like cyberattacks, bugs, datacenter outages, chip supply issues, political disagreements, etc all become major national threats really quickly. Granted, farming has had sophisticated technology for quite a few years now, but smarter AI systems will inevitably involve more interaction with cloud services, and at that point, we're setting ourselves up for some scary possibilities.

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

#80

Post by [deleted] »

AOsborn wrote: post #74
mastazi wrote: post #60

This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: > Imagine, a few years down the line, applying th…

Absolutely, swarms make a lot of sense. Also, the key difference between a 'hard' challenge like self-driving cars and something like self-sustaining agriculture is that the reliability doesn't need to be 100%. An achievable target could be something like 'one human to operate the location'. Things will break, software will glitch, maintenance will be required - but that will be OK, as long as the issues can be corre…

[deleted]
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