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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]

#113

Post by prawn »

zurtri wrote: post #31

I am waiting for this kind of tech to become viable for smaller 'hobby' type farms. you know, under 100 acres. To get the spraying done by firing up a few drones would be excellent. Particularly with weeds that are in hard to reach places on the farm.

They're very smartly having this work as a tractor attachment so they're not reinventing the literal wheels. For small farms, a scaled-down version could be pushed along like a wheelbarrow or attached to something like an ATV or ride-on mower.

But at the home garden scale, I'd like to see a dog-sized spider-like robot that would roam the block doing this. It can be very hard to keep soil weed free, and then weed it once it isn't.

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

#114

Post by defrost »

conviencefee999 wrote: post #98
defrost wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we succeed with autonomous driving .... 'We' have already succeeded in autonomous driving in agricultural and mining domains - these are much simpler, more tightly controlled and less liability prone than open highways and suburban backstreets. eg: > We run more than 130 autonomous trucks, part of our Autonomous Haulage System, across our Iron Ore operations. The trucks are operated by a supervisory system and a…

Ehhh really haven't. While you could argue farming is different due to it being more constricted, it really isn't and well unlike driving, this has a size constraint which has and likely will not be solved for in the near or distant future. It's complicated and might not be solvable. And well the current advancements while they seem nice aren't very useful. I know individuals who work in this sphere specifically and…

> And well the current advancements while they seem nice aren't very useful.

Current advancements already allow tractors to go autonomously go over the bulk of the same large areas of ground that they have for the past decade (already logged and recorded), graceful fallback alerts remote farmer to make a human decision re: tree falls, new rocks, unexpected gear state changes.

These are useful advancements in machine control.

These developments have locally run in parallel with the above linked Rio Tinto work here in W.Australia - it's a pity the largest mining operation on the globe has imagined its work to be productive and useful and allowed its cost analysis to sway its thinking lacking your insight to the contrary.

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