How many years until a robot like this will cut your grass, weed the lawn, and weed your flowerbeds?
Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides
#32Cool prototype. ...now make one that mounts on a front 3pt hitch and you might actually sell one. No need for a special robot when a different piece of equipment with its own power source has to go down the field anyway
Getting rid of weeds will be a continuous task. Farmers don't want to run tractors down rows any more than they have to, nor will they want to run a full sized tractor full-time.
Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides
#33I don't see it detecting any actual weeds? The detection is just targets and the demonstration of punching the weeds is stationary. Which leaves out the key challenge - distinguishing between weed & crop.
The problem of automated plant identification has been examined [0, 1] with good results. In [0] the classification is performed on footage from an uncontrolled agricultural setting, and the authors achieved a correct classification rate of 65% on tomato plants. Given that modern industrial agriculture is monoculture you only need to positively detect one variety of plant in an area. To avoid crop destruction due to incorrect categorization the robot could be used as a first pass and restricted to punching plants that are classified with a high degree of confidence. This could still reduce the amount of human labor necessary to tend to the field, but it might not reduce it by a degree that makes the robot a sensible economic solution. It may fail to reduce the labor needed, but I do not think that is likely.
I wonder how the performance of plant recognition degrades over the course of the crop cycle, if at all. We see in the video that some leaf matter remains after the weed is driven into the ground, and this leftover matter will influence classification during the robot's next pass. Unless the leaf matter is removed between passes it will accumulate throughout the crop cycle.
In [0] the researchers note that one reason they chose to deal with seedlings is that there is relatively little plant leaf occlusion at that stage. In [1] an end user is relied on to take a photo with a light, untextured, background and does not at all deal with partial plant leaf occlusion. That paper is not applicable to the uncontrolled field scenario.
I also found [2] while writing this comment, but have yet to read it. It boasts even better results (>90% correct for corn, 73.1% correct for tomatoes in an uncontrolled setting)than [0]
[0] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.42....
Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides
#34How many years until a robot like this will cut your grass, weed the lawn, and weed your flowerbeds?
How many years until we be stuck with this archaic and elitist concept of a lawn?
Grass where it serves some benefit such as a backyard at least serves a purpose. Front lawns in locations where they are ornamental are a blight.
Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides
#35This is cool but I have to disagree with this phrase from the article.... "Given the scale of farming today, treating weeds chemically is really the only practical way for humans to keep them under control". It's the easiest way to keep weeds under control but not the only practical way. (Source: I worked for the weed science department (yes, they had one at my school) while at university.) Here are some other method…
There is another approach to weed control. Don't do anything. Let weeds come up if they want to. I remember a crusty old guy in Florida showing me his watermelon field that was full of weeds. I said something about it and he said the weeds actually shaded the watermelons keeping them from sunburning and he had no intention of removing them. I don't know if this is necessarily true or if he just didn't feel like doing…
Funny. Masanobu Fukuoka in One Straw Revolution argues for a similar approach in orchard maintenance, if I recall correctly: allowing all sorts of plants to grow below the trees and provide ground cover.
Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is another approach to weed control. Don't do anything. Let weeds come up if they want to. I remember a crusty old guy in Florida showing me his watermelon field that was full of weeds. I said something about it and he said the weeds actually shaded the watermelons keeping them from sunburning and he had no intention of removing them. I don't know if this is necessarily true or if he just didn't feel like doing…
Funny. Masanobu Fukuoka in One Straw Revolution argues for a similar approach in orchard maintenance, if I recall correctly: allowing all sorts of plants to grow below the trees and provide ground cover.
When growing plants such as carrots, as mentioned in the parent article, the crops are competing with the weeds for space, sunlight, and nutrients. In the orchard this is not an issue, and the ground cover can be beneficial to the crop.
Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny. Masanobu Fukuoka in One Straw Revolution argues for a similar approach in orchard maintenance, if I recall correctly: allowing all sorts of plants to grow below the trees and provide ground cover.
When growing plants such as carrots, as mentioned in the parent article, the crops are competing with the weeds for space, sunlight, and nutrients. In the orchard this is not an issue, and the ground cover can be beneficial to the crop.
Oh, absolutely. One Straw Revolution isn't a weeds-are-good book. It's a description of less intrusive methods to maintain crop health.
For rice plantations, he does try to ensure weeds don't grow. I don't remember the exact methods advocated, but I believe it was placing straw all over the ground, and for some crop he grew clover in the downtime between harvest season and growing season, I think. I don't recall too much, though.
Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides
#38I have countless weeks / months experience in dealing with manual weed removal. At times when I was younger I spent 14+ hours a day out in the field destroying weeds with a hand hoe.
One of the main crops I was doing it for was squash. The squash plant is pretty broad and the hand hoe allowed you to get close in under the plant. That's something this technique couldn't handle.
As someone working on minimum wage, I could get through a pretty large area in a day. Sometimes there would half a dozen of us in a gang. I'm not sure how much a device like this would eventually cost but I suspect for the same money you could buy a lot of minimum wage manual labour.
Either way, cool prototype!
Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, but to be fair, you could even skip that and just have a remote pilot looking at the rolling video feed and clicking on targets. It still beats having people actually walking under the sun and ruining their backs to pull out weed, or blanketing with herbicide. I'm not so sure punching is a great solution though. Weed is incredibly good at reforming from very very small bits left standing.
beats ... I hope that was intentional. Seriously though, you're right, even if it requires a human in the loop it's still a huge benefit. Farms could even use remote workers to do the identification.
This seems like the easiest way to get it working now. In fact, you could do the inverse at some point in the crop cycle - get workers/robots to identify the viable crops, and from that point on stamp everything else remotely plant-like out.
Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides
#40I was amused by "A Bosch Start-Up" on the side of the machine. Now everything is a start-up.
I was just at the Lean Startup conference, and a lot of the headline speakers were from big companies like GE and Intuit. A large portion of the audience was from names I recognized as well. Being a startup is immensely fashionable.
If large companies can figure out how to house innovation, it would solve some major problems that they have. But our current model of management is basically inimical to true innovation, so personally I'm skeptical.