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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

#61

Post by akgerber »

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.

The problem is that the standard American house is modeled after a farmhouse or country house, despite the fact that we all live in cities.

Townhouses don't have lawns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Townhouse And they're excellent building blocks of walkable neighborhoods.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#62

Post by ars »

Gravityloss wrote: post #6
fchollet wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect this would result in rather superficial weed destruction, since the roots underground would be unharmed and would cause the weed to regrow a few days later. Unrooting the weeds definitely sounds more reliable to me.

On the other hand, with a laser you could process huge areas at extreme speeds. Think 100 zaps a second.

> Think 100 zaps a second.

At very low power, not enough power to kill a plant that has lots of water in it.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#63

Post by Animats »

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.

Multispectral imaging can identify weeds and separate different types of plants.[1] Humans have only 3 color sensors, but there's no reason you can't have far more. Some birds have 21. It's easy and cheap to do, although you need a camera with a special per-pixel filter instead of the usual RGB filter.

[1] http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1614/WT-07-104.1?journalCod...

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#64

Post by Animats »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #27
toyg wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

Humans are too slow. If this can be done at all, it can be done far faster than a human can do it.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#65

Post by jhallenworld »

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.

Kill them with fire! http://www.thermalweedcontrol.com/index.html

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#66

Post by Terr_ »

wpietri wrote: post #40
analog31 wrote: post #15

I 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,…

Yeah, the "start-up" label is subject to cargo-culting.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#67

Post by kbenson »

brc wrote: post #59
spdionis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawns look nice. Sounds like a good enough reason to keep them. We are not THAT overpopulated.

They also stop erosion, provide habitat for insects and animals and are pleasing to walk on. I get having a lawn in a desert is a poor use of water, but for many houses and recreational areas, it's an excellent way to cover ground.

I have no problem with lawns that are used, but what percentage of front lawns do you think get any use? I'm full in support of rear lawns or front lawns that are used, but as a status symbol I think they are wasteful of land, resources and time. Parks are an excellent place for a grass, and I'm not complaining about those either.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#68

Post by rcthompson »

fanquake wrote: post #11
jimmar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unrooting the weeds definitely sounds more reliable to me. The robot in the article just pushed the weed underground a few inches. I imagine that some weeds would just pop back after a week, and that the robot would just punch them down again.

So you now you have to run your fleet of robot weeders over the field twice? That seems like a waste of time and $ when you could achieve the desired result in a single pass. every extra pass is also more soil compaction.

Pushing the weeds below the surface is probably less disruptive to the surrounding crops than tearing out the roots. And since you have to run the machine constantly anyway to prevent new weeds from establishing themselves, just poking them down repeatedly will eventually starve them of sunlight and kill them, or at least prevent them from ever growing large enough to cause a problem.

Re: Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides

#69

Post by Gravityloss »

ars wrote: post #62
Gravityloss wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, with a laser you could process huge areas at extreme speeds. Think 100 zaps a second.

> Think 100 zaps a second. At very low power, not enough power to kill a plant that has lots of water in it.

Why do you assume low power? :)

While you're at it, attach it into a drone. Useful for animal herding and crowd control as well.

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