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Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

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Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#131

Post by Balgair »

motohagiography wrote: post #56

Given where ML and CV are today, I'd bet on open source models trained on weeds within 3-5 years. This company can scale, but their unit price is going to plummet. Also, it sounds like they're using cameras, where it's concievable that other future sensors could be more efficient. An iteration of this with higher resolution cameras and small flying drones seems like an intuitive next step. This is a super interesting…

> Also, it sounds like they're using cameras, where it's concievable that other future sensors could be more efficient.

Bit of a pedantic note:

What other sensor could you use?

I'm grasping at straws (pun not intended) to figure out any other modality that could work as well in a giant field of psuedo-randomly mixed plants with the wind blowing chemical signatures all about.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#133

Post by shantara »

dkarl wrote: post #90
swiley wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commodity drown with high powered laser for killing things based on image recognition sounds like sci-fi dystopia.

Yeah, I imagine massive overuse on "pest" species. Mosquito eradication will be a high priority for such technology, but there will be people who modify it to eradicate everything that flies or crawls. Everything smaller than a cat, if they could. I think lasers for killing large animals (including us) will be prohibitively expensive for a long time to come, fingers crossed.

Unfortunately, you don't need that much power to permanently blind a human.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#134

Post by joshuaissac »

stevespang wrote: post #111
dkarl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I imagine massive overuse on "pest" species. Mosquito eradication will be a high priority for such technology, but there will be people who modify it to eradicate everything that flies or crawls. Everything smaller than a cat, if they could. I think lasers for killing large animals (including us) will be prohibitively expensive for a long time to come, fingers crossed.

Bill Gates was already involved in a startup to radar identify and kill mosquitos with lasers . . . guess it did not go well.

It resulted in a prototype that apparently cost $50 per unit, but no retail product yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#135

Post by adwn »

frankzander wrote: post #3

Better farming methods and farmers will probably not need such and invention. I think about no drill farming. This "weed problem" comes from a farming not going with but against the nature. So it's thought that technology will solve problems which are no problems if methods to farm are optimized.

> This "weed problem" comes from a farming not going with but against the nature.

All farming is "going against nature", by definition.

Take a 100m by 100m field and let it go "with nature" for 10 years. Do you think it'll magically sprout tons of wheat? It'll be great for plants and animals, that's for sure, but we can't eat what will be growing there.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#136

Post by Balgair »

maxerickson wrote: post #73
jfkgktjrnnr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

150W of output power. Lasers are notoriously inefficient, CO2 ones are in the 5-20% range. So probably at least 1000W for the lasers, assuming 10% efficiency.

The modest engine powering it is 55 kW.

People who work in pulsed kW laser labs are all sitting here salivating at thought and also horrified at the thought.

Salivating because that's a lot of power that you can use for experiments, much more than most laser technicians have ever seen.

Horrified because not only are you going to go instantly blind (as usual), but now the rest of your head will smolder too.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#138

Post by Broken_Hippo »

gdubs wrote: post #120

Love seeing advances in this space. I have an 80 acre farm and I’m waiting for an autonomous slope mower. Question about this tech is, does it really kill weeds, or just defoliate them? Like, is this laser strong enough to get down to the roots, which are often very deep with weeds? If not, I’m wondering why lasers instead of something mechanical that can corkscrew down and tear up the entire root?

Mechanical parts have more ways to break. All of those rocks in the field are just waiting to crunch things up.

How long will weeds live if they continuously get their foiliage removed? How about when part of the root (closest to the surface) is damaged/burned as well?

I really don't know, but I imagine that if such a robot went out into the field many or most days, there wouldn't be much of an issue. The weeds would continually get weaker.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#139

Post by ed25519FUUU »

jarmitage wrote: post #112

Are there scenarios where this would be more efficient than using regenerative agriculture techniques like cover cropping to naturally out-compete weeds?

You still have to weed with those techniques, especially for perennial noxious and aggressive weeds, or else that’s all you have eventually.

It’s not as big of an issue if you have grazing animals, because many (such as sheep and goats) will often go after the “weeds” first. Pigs will happily take it straight down to the earth.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#140

Post by dalbasal »

Framing this as "One Robot vs One Person" is such lazy silliness. It genuinely means nothing.

At some point, this kind of framing was probably easier for an average reader to understand... IDK when that stopped being the case, but it's not recent.

In any case, this kind of tech is potentially interesting. Weeds, pests and other agricultural issues can usually be solved biologically (eg weeds get eaten, outcompeted, etc.), chemically (eg roundup) or mechanically (someone pulls the weed). We've long been leaning on chemical way too heavily.

If/when robotic weeding is available, the economics may be pretty compelling. If it takes off, it will almost certainly open a lot of unexpected opportunities. Genuinely important agg-tech, IMO, can be approximated by how it affects a given farm. If you are still, broadly, farming the same types of crops in the same ways then it's incremental. Most commonly today, incremental advances mean growing slightly different cultivars paired with complimentary fertilizers & pesticides. AKA, the Monsanto Way. I don't think we're going to make much more progress this way. Also, advancing to "Modern Farming" this way is pretty tightly couples with corporate farming.

What's potentially interesting about robots like this (if/when they're good) is that it may scale down well.

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