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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]

#141

Post by rmason »

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…

Watching that video made me joyful. I was an agronomist in the early nineties walking soybean fields twelve hours a day mapping weeds and then going back to the office making what's called postemerge chemical recommendations to get most of the weeds that I had observed.

During those hot days having then written software for a hobby I thought there has to be a better way. Could a sprayer map weeds and apply chemicals in a single pass? I did an in depth investigation talking to tech people and university experts to see if what I imagined was possible. What I found out was that we were decades away from the tech making it possible.

A couple of years later Monsanto came out with Roundup resistant soybeans and my soybean field walking was greatly reduced overnight. Problem with this one solution fits all was that soybean yields dipped with the resistant beans for farmers that previously had good weed control and we began to develop more Roundup resistant weeds.

I did notice that this company is working with high value crops only. I believe the reason is the tech currently is quite expensive. Though in time the cost should come down as more farmers use it.

One problem for the Eastern states is the use of shields on the boom. The company that I worked for experimented with shields on our commercial sprayers. In fact we were the first people to do it East of the Rocky Mountains. We bought them because we wanted to be able to spray on windy days. The shields had problems and were parked in the weeds in a single crop season.

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

#142

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #110
joshspankit wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that natural swarm dynamics completely baffled us up until a few years ago: How do birds communicate well enough to stay on a group? How do they know which direcion to go? How does it look like a singular consciousness is undulating through hundreds or thousands of individuals? We marvelled and were dumbfounded. But we had made it so much more complicated because we couldn’t see the few simple rules that…

> But we had made it so much more complicated because we couldn’t see the few simple rules that each of them were following. I hope you don't mean "Boids" and the three-four simple rules, because that's just an approximation of a swarm behavior made for artistic purposes - i.e. the result is supposed to pass as a flock of birds or a school of fish to casual onlookers (e.g. gamers, audience of a movie), and not to be…

[deleted]

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

#143

Post by MikePlacid »

bergenty wrote: post #14
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.

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.

- mimicry?

- going invisible?

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

#145

Post by bradknowles »

karaokeyoga wrote: post #106
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…

Reading the comments in this thread reminded me of "Silent Running" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running ). Droids (albeit 70s-style), agro-tech, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi. It's dated but enjoyable.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking that.

Of course, that movie does have certain other implications and side effects....

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

#146

Post by thwieruo23434 »

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 ?

I'm not surprised you're being downvoted. Us lot in India think the occidental culture is inherently mono-cultural; even with all the DEI stuff, all that is being fostered is phenotypic diversity (the most useless type).

Classical India seems to have had better ways. In an introduction to Dharampal's works (who has written a lot of science in pre-Modern India), Claude Alvares notes how the Dutch, who had reduced the grass species to one or two in their land, had the temerity to advise India, where each backyard has(d) hundreds of species of plant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B27IBNotwpE

Pity, everything in India too is rapidly devolving to Anglo-American monoculture now :( They (the elites, who are the ones that really count) barely even speak their own languages now.

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

#147

Post by aerophilic »

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…

For tilling to kill weeds, there actually is one that does that, Farmwise[0].

The challenge with Agtech robots in general is that you need to be able to prove payback, including all operations costs, in ideally 12 months or less on equipment.

This is very hard for most crops because you have to be constantly moving from field to field. However, it is doable and I see it happening soon, starting in specific crops (My company L5 [1] is working this for strawberries).

However, as the price of raw tech inputs (robot arms, compute, cameras) continue to fall, I do see lots of “low hanging fruit” that can be won relatively soon, especially with smart software.

[0] https://farmwise.io/ [1] https://www.l5automation.com/

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

#148

Post by danielheath »

colechristensen wrote: post #41
danielheath wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not really. Plenty of people have handheld tasers powered by 9v batteries and plenty of farm equipment can (and does) mangle people not being careful around very dangerous machines. This is just a misunderstanding of the risks involved in various things.

I'm well aware that it's far from the only thing that'll kill me on a farm.

That said, comparing a 50Kv shock to a handheld taser (which typically run at 300-500v) makes me think I might not be the one who misunderstands the risks.

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

#150

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

rubicon33 wrote: post #140
csomar wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How hard is the jump into the realm of computer vision/AI/robotics for someone with strong skills and experience building web applications? If you are willing to make the jump. It's possible. You have an advantage. > Is the coding much different? Not as much as they have marketed you to believe. > Is a company like this employing math/theroy-heavy people to develop new types of AI or are they working higher up the…

I would second this with some anecdata... I have worked for one of these companies that produces fancy AI based hardware. Turns out the hardware is made in China and the AI is handled by third parties (amazon, etc.) Does that mean putting it all together is trivial? Of course not. But it's not as difficult as it might seem from the outside.

being the middle man is fun tho. other people do the hard stuff and then you get to combine it into something actually useful!
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