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Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#41

Post by jqm »

garrettgrimsley wrote: post #36
arjie wrote: post #35

Earlier 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.

In carrots (which are densely planted like four rows to a bed) weeds sometimes do come up in the bed between plants. They usually aren't many because the carrot tops get so dense they smother most weeds out. You can't cultivate those weeds with a tractor (without destroying the carrots) and I don't think they have a roundup resistant carrot. So it's people walking the rows with hoes from what I've seen, or some other herbicide carrots are immune too. The device in the article might be especially good for situations like this.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#42

Post by hammock »

garrettgrimsley wrote: post #33
Havoc wrote: post #9

I 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…

I wonder if there is an opportunity with GMOs to aid automated plant identification. For instance, insert a green fluorescent protein gene in your crop, and design a robot that senses the fluorescence.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#43

Post by fanquake »

aidos wrote: post #38

I 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 co…

There's a research project being done on the viability of hand picking radish plants out of wheat and lupin crops on broadacre farms here in Western Australia. Some farmers already do it, but once the results come out, I'm wondering home many more will start.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#44

Post by visarga »

toyg wrote: post #17
Havoc wrote: post #9

I 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.

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.

> you could even skip that and just have a remote pilot looking at the rolling video feed and clicking on targets.

Then you could use that video to train a network to find weeds and get rid of the operator. You could also test the network a part of the same dataset to see how well it finds the right spots.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#45

Post by visarga »

aaron695 wrote: post #25

It's a good example of how play in the future will also go the way of jobs. Why garden when your neighbors will have amazing gardens cheaply designed and looked after by robots. And it'll be smart, it'll know exactly how many weeds to leave so it doesn't look to perfect, exactly when to plant and pollinate, order things online when needed.

Besides gardening, robots could clean up garbage. An army of small bots could clean up a forest in no time (or go underwater to clean up the shores).

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#46

Post by stretchwithme »

I think eventually farming will be completely robotic and we'll have farm on our roofs. Household waste will be processed and used for it. Robots will harvest crops for us and even get them to market if we aren't around to eat them, probably selling to people in the neighborhood.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#47

Post by whoiskevin »

kbenson wrote: post #34
barney54 wrote: post #31

How 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.

For as long as I live where a lawn does not require a sprinkler. Think outside the box.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#48

Post by kbenson »

whoiskevin wrote: post #47
kbenson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For as long as I live where a lawn does not require a sprinkler. Think outside the box.

So we are all stuck with an outdated concept that originated from aristocratic landowners who wanted to show how much money they had by devoting a portion of their estate to not growing crops and just being manicured because you can do it without watering?

How very kind of you to epitomize the "get off my lawn" meme, but I'm not on your lawn. I'm not telling you to get rid of your lawn, but the concept as it exists now and it's popularization is at best wasteful, and in some cases actively causes problems with water availability in some areas. Some reform in the popularized concept of a front lawn would be beneficial to everyone.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#49

Post by im2w1l »

hammock wrote: post #42
garrettgrimsley wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder if there is an opportunity with GMOs to aid automated plant identification. For instance, insert a green fluorescent protein gene in your crop, and design a robot that senses the fluorescence.

Imagining the consumer reaction to green-glow-in-the-dark crops made me smile.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#50

Post by claar »

doctoboggan wrote: post #16
Havoc wrote: post #9

I 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.

I imagine if the robot is the one who planted the original crops it would know exactly where they should be. Any other growth is defined as a weed.

Exactly. You don't even need the robot to plant it; crops are planted in rows. Tractors and combines today already track exactly where the plants are planted down to sub-inch accuracy (http://farmindustrynews.com/accurate-inch -- other source, my family farm).
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