I have a feeling that the creators might be wrongly assuming that we could evolve plants to thrive in extreme monocultures (no other plant or animal life). I suspect these efforts will be met with diminishing returns of a) seeing lower yields because plants don't need to compete for resources b) really hard to go beyond 99% of desired plant because of energy consumption c) weeds adapting to fool the AI and resemble desired plants in phenotype and d) people who tread on the soil to weed by hand interact with the soil in a different way than a robot on wheels.
Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
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Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#72"It's harder to find people to do that work every single year" Translation: The wages we pay are crap and we're not going to pay them more.
It’s not a tech industry ffs. The agriculture is already operating on a thin margin.
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://carbonrobotics.com/features Lasers are 150 watts, so a small fraction of the power draw. Seems like getting the automation is key, replacing herbicides would require multiple passes over the same ground.
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.
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#74Soo.. how long would it take for the operator to detect that the units weeding all human foodcrops in the US have been hacked and are weeding the actual crop instead of weeds?
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#75There is a reckoning coming when agricultural robots will overtake manual labor. This is going to lead to a giant calamity of agricultural workers, specifically migrant workers, who are suddenly going to be without a job. I love the robots, I think it’s great, but we should be prepared for a human concern that WILL come.
Farming is already heavily industrialized and automated and uses a fraction of the labor it did a century ago. This is more a matter of using non toxic ways of dealing with weeds.
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#76I have a feeling that the creators might be wrongly assuming that we could evolve plants to thrive in extreme monocultures (no other plant or animal life). I suspect these efforts will be met with diminishing returns of a) seeing lower yields because plants don't need to compete for resources b) really hard to go beyond 99% of desired plant because of energy consumption c) weeds adapting to fool the AI and resemble d…
How is this different from people pulling the weeds? They could have evolved to fool us already. I don’t see a huge difference since image recognition is something computers can do on par with humans.
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#77I want to see details on power source and energy usage. That's where I'm a bit skeptical. To do the 20 acres they're talking about you'd need one hell of a huge battery, assuming it's electric. Even just to move the thing. Then add power draw for the laser on as well. Also seems odd to have it be something that is self-powered and autonomous rather than just something you pull behind a tractor on the three point hitc…
https://carbonrobotics.com/features Lasers are 150 watts, so a small fraction of the power draw. Seems like getting the automation is key, replacing herbicides would require multiple passes over the same ground.
Just a point of clarification, for a CO2 laser, getting 150 optical watts out the aperture usually means putting about 1500 electrical watts into the tube. The rest comes out as heat in the water jacket, which you pass through a radiator or possibly an active chiller, and those pumps and fans draw their own power as well.
And before those 1500W get into the tube, they go through a high-voltage power supply, which is maybe 80% efficient if you're lucky. All-up power draw on a laser of that scale is somewhere north of 2KW from the wall.
(And before anyone asks: Yes this is very good efficiency for a laser, which is one reason why CO2 is so popular. YAG and fiber lasers tend to be in the low single-digit percents.)
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#78https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
When Ford hired workers to deal with the pests, the pests evolved to hide from the workers under the leaves below knee level.
I hope this technology also gets applied to pests like the invasive Popillia japonic.
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#79I love that this reminds me of the floating gardening robots in Fallout 4, tending the plants even after humans were gone.
Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
#80"It's harder to find people to do that work every single year" Translation: The wages we pay are crap and we're not going to pay them more.
Raise the wages -> food prices rise. Rinse and repeat.