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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]

#151

Post by deelowe »

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…

Don’t leave me hanging. What is the constraint that is unlikely to be solved?

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

#152

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

robotresearcher wrote: post #104
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…

> the future is swarms of small robots A key problem with small autonomous robots is their energy supply and mass. Batteries have low energy density. Actuators have bad power to weight ratios too. Living things are enormously more efficient. So much so that the intuition apparently offered by watching animals usually does not apply. This is extremely true for swarm robotics, inspired by ants, termites, etc. Swarm cri…

what if we make them bigger than insects but still relatively small? just an arm on a track. heck, we can put the energy in the track too. boom, no battery.

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

#153

Post by joshvm »

battery_glasses wrote: post #70

When I see stuff like this sometimes I get depressed that I'm building apps that just move little bits of information around the web and don't have any real demonstrable value to the world. How hard is the jump into the realm of computer vision/AI/robotics for someone with strong skills and experience building web applications? Is the coding much different? Is a company like this employing math/theroy-heavy people to…

Robotics is a big field and encompasses a huge range of things. Similarly a lot of computer vision is pretty technical, particularly for robotics applications. Have a look at ROS and play around, you can simulate a lot of stuff. I'd also suggest Nvidia's Jetbot but the chip shortage has killed it.

AI-wise, nowadays model training stacks are practically codeless. Training a state of the art model on custom data usually boils down to changing some parameters in a config file, plus some boilerplate code. Not always that easy of course, but training an image classifier today can be a single line of Python.

It's not so much piping data around but dealing with datasets in any kind of non-trivial problem is where the hard work is. Neural nets are just another tool for most data scientists. For example exploring Kaggle will get you familiar with weird datasets, but actually collecting, arranging for data to be labelled, and then cleaning it is a skill on its own.

That's usually where experience comes in. Hence there are a lot of startups charging frankly obscene amounts of money for data labelling and curation tools.

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

#154

Post by rubicon33 »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #150
rubicon33 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Absolutely. And, a ton of valuable tools can be made. Make no mistake about it!

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

#155

Post by EGreg »

robotresearcher wrote: post #104
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…

> the future is swarms of small robots A key problem with small autonomous robots is their energy supply and mass. Batteries have low energy density. Actuators have bad power to weight ratios too. Living things are enormously more efficient. So much so that the intuition apparently offered by watching animals usually does not apply. This is extremely true for swarm robotics, inspired by ants, termites, etc. Swarm cri…

The problem is that swarms of robots can be used for destructive purposes. There, the amount of energy expended and the loss of some drones is no match for the destruction caused. Not to mention all those decentralized self healing swarms are totally resistant to the conventional “destroy the Borg queen” nonsense trope of so many alien movies. (Yes I specifically mentioned the Borg queen because it was the moment Trek nerfed the Borg’s greatest strength and became like all the other denoument alien action flick franchises)

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

#156

Post by Wahash-Hominid »

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…

Sydney based startup Agerris was doing mechanical weeding 2 years ago. Unfortunately they went under about a year ago. You can see their platform in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR7FAtgZBzk

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

#157

Post by stubish »

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 ?

If non-productive plants and insects are mixed in, you will need more farmland to produce the same amount of crops. In the bigger picture it would be counter productive.

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

#158

Post by chris_va »

lchengify wrote: post #17

There's another company called Carbon Robotics that uses lasers instead of weedkiller. The attachment they built needed a custom cooling rig to deal with the dozens of lasers. Super interesting engineering going on with agtech. https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/farming-robot

Hm, why lasers?

Seems like a phased array microwave would be cheaper, require no moving parts, and be able to target the root system ... and be less of a safety risk.

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

#160

Post by bergenty »

MikePlacid wrote: post #143
bergenty wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hmm very good points.
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