[HN Gopher] Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
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Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
Author : HiroProtagonist
Score : 568 points
Date : 2021-04-26 13:02 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.freethink.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.freethink.com)
| oconnor663 wrote:
| > robot kills 100k
|
| It was only a matter of time. A doom of our own making.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Autonomous robots armed with powerful infrared lasers -- what
| could go wrong?
| gdubs wrote:
| Love seeing advances in this space. I have an 80 acre farm and
| I'm waiting for an autonomous slope mower.
|
| Question about this tech is, does it really _kill_ weeds, or just
| defoliate them? Like, is this laser strong enough to get down to
| the roots, which are often very deep with weeds?
|
| If not, I'm wondering why lasers instead of something mechanical
| that can corkscrew down and tear up the entire root?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > Question about this tech is, does it really kill weeds, or
| just defoliate them?
|
| Question from a non-farmer: if it were cost-effective to
| defoliate weeds once per day, would that be good enough? I.e.,
| I would think that totally prevents the weeds from thriving.
| gdubs wrote:
| It depends on the weed. Overall you're going to put pressure
| on it. With conventional fields like the ones pictured in
| this article, there's often no ground cover. If you have a
| ground cover (say, clover) and you're defoliating the weeds
| all the time, then you have a chance.
|
| But _some_ weeds, like invasive blackberries here in the
| Pacific Northwest, are extremely resilient and will shrug off
| defoliation.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Thanks for the info!
|
| > But some weeds, like invasive blackberries here in the
| Pacific Northwest, are extremely resilient and will shrug
| off defoliation.
|
| How does that work? I thought all plants (by definition?)
| need photosynthesis to stay alive in non-dormant states.
|
| Do blackberry plants have some way of getting energy other
| than photosynthesis in their leaves?
| burnished wrote:
| They grow these enormous and very resilient root balls
| under ground. I was taught that the most efficient way to
| kill a blackberry bush was to remove the structure above
| ground, locate a central stalk that leads under ground,
| and stick the end in kerosene or gasoline I don't
| remember which. That gets sucked up into the root ball
| and kills the plant. Never done it myself, mind.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Sure that is a one-stop permanent solution for a plant
| which grows back its leaves very quickly but the question
| is, how can the plant thrive enough to harm other crops
| if you defoliate it every day?
| throwaway41597 wrote:
| If the crop is near a bush, then the plant can happily
| grow in the bush and send roots to the crop.
| [deleted]
| redisman wrote:
| If you keep cutting it off and have control over its
| whole potential growing area it will eventually die. It
| has some scary properties like roots that travel 20 feet
| easily and spring up a new independent plant and a insane
| growth rate once it sprouts. If it's out of control you
| probably need someone to first destroy the hedge with a
| flamethrower
| gdubs wrote:
| I'm not a botanist but my understanding is that the root
| balls hold a ton of energy and the plant can just keep
| sending out shoots, and spread underground for fairly
| long distances. So, eventually that energy source will
| run out, but they're invasive because of how resilient
| they are at finding sneaky ways to hide and appear.
| binrec wrote:
| > I thought all plants (by definition?) need
| photosynthesis to stay alive in non-dormant states.
|
| There are parasitic plants that don't photosynthesize at
| all, like the Monotropoideae and Rafflesiaceae.
|
| Among photosynthesizing plants, rhubarb can be "forced"
| (grown in complete darkness to reduce bitterness and get
| an earlier harvest), and potatoes can sprout if left in
| the pantry for too long.
| munificent wrote:
| Invasive European blackberries can also draw energy
| directly from the anger of gardeners vainly attempting to
| remove them.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Defoliating weeds instead of picking them by the roots is a
| great way to end up with a field of weeds.
| djrogers wrote:
| Depends on the weed and the ground cover the weeds are
| competing against. For many weeds, simply mowing them in the
| presence of decent ground cover is completely effective, as
| they're optimized to grow tall quickly - defoliate them at
| the right time and they've already spent their energy
| reserves.
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| Had the same thought, also totally agree. Looking forward to
| seeing more advancements in this field. Pun intended.
| evanlivingston wrote:
| Is there a reason you need to mow your slope?
| gdubs wrote:
| We have an upland prairie which is a vanishing ecosystem
| which we are conserving. It's fairly steep. We don't have
| sheep but maybe someday we'll get some. Until then, mowing is
| a way to keep it healthy and free of invasive plants.
| titzer wrote:
| Is mowing really any less work than pulling weeds by hand?
| Keep in mind that insects need habitat, too, and tall
| grasses are key for them. Mowing obliterates insects.
| [deleted]
| gdubs wrote:
| Over time we're establishing native fescues which don't
| get super tall. As well as native wildflowers. All
| beneficial for the insects. Once established, mowing
| becomes less frequent. But we're talking about 20 acre
| areas, so yea it's a lot more realistic than weeding by
| hand.
| chasd00 wrote:
| when i was in HS i worked on one of those crews you see
| mowing highways and state parks (super good money for a
| teen but man it was hard work). Mowing on a slope with a
| large tractor can be very dangerous because you can tip
| over. Automating away the danger to a human may be worth
| the effort in its own right.
| delfinom wrote:
| The real problem is tractors aren't designed correctly
| for slopes, you don't need quite automation as much as a
| vehicle with lower center of gravity.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| They make remote control (wired) mowers specifically for
| this use case. I've also seen some steep-slope brush
| mowers from Swiss companies, but those are hand-operated.
| Not surprisingly, the Swiss have a lot of farm equipment
| designed for use on very steep slopes.
| evanlivingston wrote:
| Nice! This is similar to the problem I face with my
| property, on a much smaller scale. Currently I'm hand
| weeding the invasive plants, but even for a 100' x 10'
| patch it's labor intensive.
| gdubs wrote:
| For areas I manage / garden by hand, I can not say enough
| good things about this trail tool:
|
| https://www.forestry-
| suppliers.com/product_pages/products.ph...
|
| I use it for _everything_ , from digging up plants, to
| leveraging boulders, to actually maintaining trails.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Mechanical parts have more ways to break. All of those rocks in
| the field are just waiting to crunch things up.
|
| How long will weeds live if they continuously get their
| foiliage removed? How about when part of the root (closest to
| the surface) is damaged/burned as well?
|
| I really don't know, but I imagine that if such a robot went
| out into the field many or most days, there wouldn't be much of
| an issue. The weeds would continually get weaker.
| kickout wrote:
| Correct and also you (should) benefit from the main cash crop
| outcompeting the weed, eventually. Just hope it doesn't go to
| seed before it dies
| gdubs wrote:
| Tractors break, sure, but steel implements have been doing a
| pretty good job of handling rocky soil for a very long time.
|
| Fixing a blue steel corkscrew seems easier than debugging a
| laser.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| I very highly doubt that a farmer is generally going to
| debug a laser on the spot. That requires a skill set not
| really needed to be a farmer, and who knows how long it'll
| take.
|
| Realistically, a farmer would swap out the part.
|
| Any actual work on the laser is more likely to be done by a
| trained professional, if anything to cut down on accidental
| burns.
| Qworg wrote:
| Depends on the laser(s) and the weeds in question. Deep rooted
| weeds require different IR/UV than broadleaf.
|
| They actually kill them because they cook the root. That's ALSO
| why it has to be autonomous - it can't be done at a run.
|
| We worked on this when I was at MTD, but I think they abandoned
| the project after I left.
| gdubs wrote:
| That's very cool. Still working on farm space projects?
| Qworg wrote:
| Not at this time - founded a fintech company instead.
|
| I do miss hardware though!
| chris_va wrote:
| Wouldn't a microwave be easier (power, speed, penetration
| depth, etc)?
| Qworg wrote:
| Depends on the wavelength/absorption. The goal was to
| attack both the root and the leaf. There are more
| mechanical methods using steam + a spike that work very
| well too.
|
| Here's a very (terribly) high level technology overview
| from the company we were working with:
| https://g-neighbor.com/gni-technology/
|
| > The reason a plant is green is because it reflects green
| light and for photosynthesis a plant uses blue light.
| Overloading the blue frequency range disrupts the enzymes
| in the photosynthetic process, which cuts off the food
| supply to the plant and it dies. Some herbicides overload
| the metabolic system of the plant and makes the weed burn
| from the inside out. I thought that overloading the
| photosynthetic system would maybe do the same thing.
| danbuscaglia wrote:
| Thank you for sharing, unlike people with absolutely zero
| experience in agriculture speculating about their half baked
| ideas about it.
| naruvimama wrote:
| How about fires?
|
| This seems to be a risk with the use of high power lasers, meant
| to burn the weeds.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Does it leave the roots though? Seems a mechanical instrument
| would be cheaper and more energy efficient.
|
| Like most whiz bang farming tech it seems too clever (expensive)
| by half.
| sidibe wrote:
| A mechanical instrument would have to be a lot more clever than
| a laser to destroy the weed without messing with the wanted
| plants.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| https://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.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_beetle
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Put another way, the workers didn't bother to look under the
| low leaves, so the pests there had a survival advantage, and
| eventually became predominant.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Here I was thinking of the film _Runaway_ (1984). It had farming
| robots which eliminated pests with grippers and grinders -- pick
| up a caterpillar, drop it into the grinder. I like that a bit
| better than the laser solution.
|
| Not _all_ of the *cides could be replaced with these, but
| certainly you could identify undesired plants and insects that
| way, and destroy them. Insects _may_ be fast enough to require
| lasers, but who knows? Non-desired plants could simply get
| snipped and fall to the ground. Fungi ... could at least be
| identified and marked on a map for later spraying.
|
| I think all of this is do-able (and a lot better place to start
| for self-driving AI than the lofty goal of cars, given the
| restricted domain, lower speed, reduced danger ...), but the real
| question is: can these robots price out lower than the *cides
| they might replace?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| I love that this reminds me of the floating gardening robots in
| Fallout 4, tending the plants even after humans were gone.
| [deleted]
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I like it, but if it's going to burn fuel to power a laser,
| wouldn't it be much more efficient to just put a blowtorch on a
| robotic arm?
| efitz wrote:
| Hey, let's make an autonomous robot, give it a high powered
| laser, and program it to seek out and destroy organic life. What
| could possibly go wrong?
| joosters wrote:
| _" 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.
| f6v wrote:
| Raise the wages -> food prices rise. Rinse and repeat.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| People would import food.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Its funny, I've lived most of my life not too far from
| fields growing food. But when I go to the grocery store,
| most of the produce there is imported.
|
| In 2019, California agriculture produced about $50B in
| receipts, with almost $22B in exports. Our water goes with
| those exports too.
| danbruc wrote:
| No, the price increase will be much smaller than the wage
| increase because the wage increase only goes to the fraction
| of the population that does the work while the price increase
| applies to the entire population.
| pitaj wrote:
| If you raise the base cost of production in a low margin
| case like agriculture, then the price of the good must
| increase or they would be running at a loss.
| notfromhere wrote:
| Agriculture is incredibly subsidized, which means cost of
| production and cost at point of sale do not have a tight
| relationship
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| Yes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra 10
| cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be life
| changing for farmers.
|
| But the market will always find the place where the work
| is unbearable and stop just shy of that.
| f6v wrote:
| > Yes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra
| 10 cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be
| life changing for farmers.
|
| You underestimate the percentage of the income some
| people spend on food. That's why agriculture is heavily
| subsidised.
| danbruc wrote:
| Of course, but if everyone pays $1 more then the wages
| can increase by $10 assuming 10% of the population works
| in agriculture which still leaves them $9 better off. My
| point was just that a wage increase is not nullified by
| the price increase as long as not everyone is working in
| the fields.
| chongli wrote:
| _if everyone pays $1 more_
|
| That's a collective action problem. You can't get
| everyone to pay $1 more. If your strawberries (for
| example) cost $1 more per pint then your sales will drop
| accordingly. It doesn't matter if all strawberry farms
| agree to pay more to their strawberry pickers. You aren't
| only competing against other strawberry farms, you're
| competing against all other food. If strawberries are too
| expensive, people will eat candy or potato chips instead.
| danbruc wrote:
| So it turn out that people or not willing to pay what it
| costs to produce strawberries at a wage level at which
| people are willing to do the hard work. That's fine. The
| farmer should try to lower the costs by automation or
| switch to producing potatoes for those potato chips.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| There is also a demographic inversion taking place in many
| parts of the world...
| joosters wrote:
| But is that a cause or an effect?
| partiallypro wrote:
| They actually pay pretty well considering ($15-20/hr in some
| cases,) it's just very hard work. You also have to consider
| that farms don't make much money. They don't have massive
| margins like Google and a single bad weather event can wipe out
| any profit for the year.
| ciconia wrote:
| I'm not sure that's really the reason, but at the same time it
| seems the overall tendency is to invest more in machinery and
| automation rather than pay better wages.
| sprainedankles wrote:
| I'd push back on that a little bit. I grew up on a farm that's
| still operating today, and it truly is difficult to find people
| to work those jobs. The farm pays just as well as any other job
| in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be
| more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer,
| and work is more sporadic/seasonal. When harvest rolls around,
| farmers need to get the crop out of the ground ASAP. That means
| 10-14 hour days for 4 weeks straight, otherwise, you'll lose
| product. It can be physically demanding and monotonous work.
|
| But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great
| example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something
| very important: providing food.
|
| So I think it falls into a similar category of "college is
| over-emphasized and we have a dwindling supply of trades-
| workers". While in school in a rural farm town, I never once
| heard anyone say "what about farming?" when discussing future
| career choices. It's not marketed as an attractive option.
| Maybe it's as simple as "farmers have the work-life balance of
| an emergency room doctor while making ~1/6th" (source: Dad is
| the farmer, Brother-in-law is the doctor)
|
| Anyway, it's a problem I think about a lot. I didn't get into
| farming, but in many ways I wish I had, because it's a highly
| undervalued skill with a very rewarding outcome: you feed
| communities. How do we change the narrative? Do we need policy
| changes? Continued technological advancement? A push to educate
| the next generation of farmers within schools? I'm not sure,
| but I don't think it's always as simple as saying "it doesn't
| pay enough". That _is_ an issue, but it's not the only issue.
| MayeulC wrote:
| > But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great
| example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something
| very important: providing food.
|
| I'd love to take a break from my job once in a while to do
| some other, probably more manual work.
|
| I think everyone used to go back to the countryside to help
| with harvest during summer, bur I feel overspecialized these
| days. How about incentivizing companies to take more part-
| time workers (as in, do not make it difficult to do so)?
| Together with minimal wages, it could be quite interesting. I
| also think having a broader skillset (more people helping)
| would help quite a bit: If I worked part-time at a bakery, I
| could probably help them with their computer/electronics
| troubles, for instance.
| myself248 wrote:
| Vocation Vacations.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| My uncle was a farmer, and I had odd jobs on the farm. I
| remember the potato harvest as being cold, back-breaking and
| utterly boring hard work. I've also been a fruit picker,
| wasn't much better.
|
| But. I survived my early 20's on these kinds of jobs while I
| sorted my shit out. I'm grateful for the experience and the
| ability to support myself while I did that.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown,
| so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with
| the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more
| sporadic /seasonal_
|
| If it pays as much as other jobs with shorter, less sporadic
| hours, it's underpaid.
| bluGill wrote:
| Over the course of the year you make the same. However some
| months you make a lot more/less than others.
| openasocket wrote:
| It's kind of a shitty job no matter how much you pay. The work
| is seasonal so the people doing this have to move around
| following the work. It's also in remote locations, there aren't
| apartments for rent right next to the farm. Often the farm has
| to provide housing, which of course means they will do whatever
| they can to cut costs. Internet and cell reception are going to
| be abysmal, nothing but farmland for miles in every direction.
| And you're constantly on the move following the next job. Don't
| get me wrong, there are some serious things that can and need
| to be done to improve the industry, but even with all of those
| fixed it's not a job for everyone.
| sidibe wrote:
| Manual weeding is really not a job people want to do in the
| developed world. IMO it's the worst part of farming in that
| requires working at ground level all day and needs to be done
| every couple weeks. It will wipe you out physically. Typically
| people who have to do this for long and have any other job
| available to them will switch even for a pay cut, but farmers
| can't really offer much because food production is low-margin
| (and in the USA they are competing with farms that use
| herbicides).
| klohto wrote:
| It's not a tech industry ffs. The agriculture is already
| operating on a thin margin.
| pitaj wrote:
| Paying people to walk through fields picking weeds doesn't
| sound scalable or sustainable to me.
| AlstZam wrote:
| It was for the last 11 000 years. With variabilities, but
| based on demographic only it was pretty scalable and
| sustainable.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Most of humanity was suffering for the past 11000 years.
| Almost everyone lived in extreme poverty.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| A lot of slave labor was involved in the last 11 000 years.
| kube-system wrote:
| A mere 125 years ago it required _the majority_ of the US
| workforce to farm enough food for people to eat. The
| mechanization of agriculture enabled much of the
| technological and cultural progress of the past couple
| centuries.
| slumdev wrote:
| Anything that reduces the amount of Roundup that gets sprayed
| into the environment...
| f6v wrote:
| Anyone who has pulled weeds in their life knows it's incredibly
| hard labour. We should automate agriculture as much as possible.
| jpollock wrote:
| It looks like almost 50% of the plot is taken up by wheel rut?
|
| Is that typical?
| djrogers wrote:
| Depends on the crop. Spacing is a trade off between output,
| health of individual plants, and workability.
|
| In some cases the tradeoff can simply be between the quantity
| vs quality of the crop, but it's not always intuitive which
| strategy results in improved quality.
| contingencies wrote:
| Yes. Also don't forget 50% of the medium term future yield of
| the earth is taken up by short term over-exploitation of
| topsoil, 50% of the medium term water supply is taken up by
| artificial irrigation of the monoculture, and 50% of the water-
| holding capacity of the land is removed owing to reduced tree
| cover. But don't worry, the farmer made 50% more and his
| children are 50% more likely to not be farmers and to buy 50%
| worse produce from 50% fewer centralised food megacorps with
| 50% higher profits owned by 50% less shareholders, under 50%
| less regulation!
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Having battled weeds in a previous lifetime I can tell you those
| weeds are far from dead.
| jerf wrote:
| Yeah, but if you can do something like roll this over your
| entire field once a week or every couple of weeks, it won't
| matter that they're not _dead_. All you really need is for them
| to not be able to thrive and outcompete your corn. Starving
| them of light by cutting off their visible bits periodically
| will do the job just fine.
| [deleted]
| etxm wrote:
| Have the robots answered the age old philosophical question: What
| is a weed?
| mythrwy wrote:
| Is there any way to change the row spacing? Just watching the
| video there doesn't appear to be. So is it just for onions?
| anticristi wrote:
| So excited to finally hear an application of AI that has
| potential to improve human life quality. I was starting to worry
| that all that AI engineers will train is lawyers-turned-cats
| models.
| bartread wrote:
| You make a fair point but I'd be lying if I said I'm entirely
| comfortable with the idea of a robot armed with lasers no
| matter how putatively benign its stated purpose. It's in my
| nature to worry about what might happen if one (or many) of
| these things were hacked.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Here's a competing device that is solar powered and seems to have
| figured out that mechanical weeding is cheaper than a bunch of
| friggin lasers
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP7GoNKcTS4
| kickout wrote:
| Good timing
|
| https://thinkingagriculture.io/the-agriculture-unicorn-hidin...
| roamerz wrote:
| Awesome news. Hopefully this technology will prove out and
| mature. Pesticides, while useful also have long term negative
| affects that will be around for a long time.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I really like the idea that a massive robot can be certified
| Organic.
| [deleted]
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I wonder why targeting with machine learning is more efficient
| that zapping every square centimeter (besides the planted
| region)? Downside, more electricity. Upside, much faster
| probably?
| underseacables wrote:
| There 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.
| hondo77 wrote:
| Ag already uses way fewer workers than they did in the past.
| There are still some migrant workers but not nearly the number
| that there were 20 - 40 years ago.
| te_chris wrote:
| Nah, you're overdoing it. A lot of farming is already
| automated, and across the so-called 'Advanced Economies' the
| replacement rate for workers is too low anyway. We're heading
| for a demographic crunch with too few workers, especially as
| all the ageing boomers need care too.
|
| for more:
| https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-...
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't see it, all I see is a labor force that is being freed
| up to do better things with their time. Of course in our
| current political environment everyone is extremely selfish and
| only out for their own gains. Nobody cares about the short term
| unemployment problems of these people.
|
| In theory our economic system has been set up in a way that
| structural unemployment is impossible in the long term term.
| Automation increases the excess savings rate by cutting labor
| costs, the excess money is then invested into more automation
| which only causes excess savings to grow. The unemployment
| caused by automation goes hand in hand with deflationary
| pressure as automation decreases the cost of goods. The Fed
| will respond to a fall in the inflation rate by lowering the
| interest rates, which encourages borrowers to invest their
| money and create more jobs. If borrowers fail to invest and the
| excess savings keep accumulating the interest rates will drop
| until they hit 0% at which point people will switch to treasury
| bonds and if those fall to 0% they will withdraw their money as
| cash. As treasury yields drop to 0% this forces the US
| government to increase the total investment rate of the economy
| on behalf of the buyers of the treasury bonds. If the
| government doesn't increase its deficit the economy will have
| to respond by reducing the total savings rate, which
| effectively means unemployment because someone must consume
| more than they earn. If all of the above fails, the government
| can send stimulus checks to its citizens. This will increase
| the inflation rate which will eat away at uninvested savings.
| In theory the Fed could the same thing but it would be called
| helicopter money with the crucial difference that there would
| be nothing on the Fed's balance sheet to counteract inflation
| exceeding expectations.
|
| Of course all of this is in theory, in practice there is zero
| political will power. Just look at Trump, he could have done
| the infrastructure bill, but he didn't. It wouldn't surprise me
| if Biden fails to push it through and we have to come up with
| increasingly extreme options that nobody wants. Ideas like
| Keynesian gold digging only exist because the political
| environment has "collapsed" to the point where no good ideas
| are left.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| The current way is to spray a broadbase weed killer. From a
| decent sized tractor, usually with some sort of GPS guided
| map.
| anotheryou wrote:
| Funny how the field is all dead.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Is it just me or did anyone else replace 'weed' with 'anti-
| government protestor'?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's all fun and games until the selection pressure evolves weeds
| that say "human" on their leaves to fool the AI.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| If that were possible, wouldn't it have already evolved that
| millenia ago in order to evade humans pulling it up by the
| roots?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They absolutely have, in various fashions. Try getting
| dandelions out of a lawn - miss a bit of the taproot and
| it'll come right back.
|
| Elsewhere on this thread is a great example of this in
| practice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
|
| > Seeds that are thrown the same distance as flax seeds have
| thus been selected for, making it near impossible to separate
| the seeds of these two species.
| piyh wrote:
| Farming goes from broad selection against pests with chemicals
| to introducing a massive selection pressure towards biological
| mimicry and adversarial image attacks.
| goda90 wrote:
| And eventually that mimicry just creates us new secondary
| crops like oats:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
| jerf wrote:
| I wouldn't worry about it too much, for a couple of reasons.
|
| First, the evolution of the computational model is simply
| _faster_ than biological evolution. The computation model is
| going to be inside biological evolution 's (metaphorical)
| OODA loop. Humans are going to be helping, too, it's not like
| it's just going to be up to the deep learning algorithms on
| their own.
|
| Second, for most weed plants, they aren't just a couple of
| genes away from mimicking corn... they're probably dozens or
| hundreds of genes away from mimicking corn. Evolution is OK
| at adapting current things to new uses, or doing a massively-
| parallel search on what you can do with just a tweak to a
| gene, but if the task can't be done with one of those things,
| it just loses and the organism dies. Or, to put it another
| way, it's good at climbing slopes one step at a time, but if
| you present it with a cliff it just fails.
|
| It's essentially the same reason why nothing has evolved a
| resistance to a human gardener yanking them physically out of
| the ground and leaving them to die on the concrete... it's
| not just a matter of tweaking a couple of genes for that.
| This robot presents an _exceedingly_ harsh selection
| landscape for a weed.
| [deleted]
| bartmika wrote:
| You're missing another remarkable ability of nature -
| coevolved species with humans. In essence, they keep evolving
| until humans find a use for them in their lives (be it
| personal, medical, industrial, etc) and then end up
| caring/nurturing them. Or another way to phrase it: The weeds
| evolve so they don't compete with the crops the human grows.
|
| A few examples come to mind:
|
| - "Clovers" fix nitrogen in the ground, other plants can take
| that nitrogen from the ground, some gardeners now
| intentionally keep this weed to benefit the plants they are
| growing for crops. I think the term is called "rotating cover
| crop".
|
| - "Comfrey" has incredibly long tap root which mines minerals
| and stores those in the leaves. Gardners/farms can plant
| comfrey, chop the entire top off, the decaying leaves release
| the minerals into the surface soil for the surround crop
| plants to utilize. Without comfrey, those minerals would of
| been locked away from the main crop. After the comfrey is
| cut, it grows back the leaves again and the gardener/farmer
| can repeat this cycle.
|
| - Some weeds attract beneficial insects to the garden/farm
| and thus benefit the main crop. Wise gardener/farmer would
| keep these around. For example, more bees means more insect
| pollinated fruit to be grown.
|
| The pattern with highly competitive specifies results in
| either extinction of one of the species or a mutual
| beneficial evolution. For example:
|
| - "Bull horn Acacia tree" - Ants and the tree have co-evolved
| that in the present they are highly depend on each other for
| survival. In the history, at one point when the ants and tree
| were introduced the ants brought a lot of acacia tree
| destruction followed by ant death because of loss of food
| source - but over time the trees that benefited the ants got
| selected along with the ants that were compatible with the
| trees.
|
| If you'd like to learn more on the topic of coevolved
| species, I recommend this 30 min video on the topic
| https://youtu.be/hCAvBmY7ZgA
|
| I don't know what this robot will do, the story is being
| currently written so we will see what happens!
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I know this is supposed to be a joke, but come on. In what
| possible world would this ever happen? They're not dragging
| this over people lying down in a field and I doubt the
| technology is even made to not target humans because they're
| never in target range.
| SamBam wrote:
| True, the weeds will evolve to have the text "Corn" on them.
|
| And eventually the humans will too.
| cwkoss wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/08/typograph.
| ..
|
| Typographic ML attacks work and are pretty funny.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| Or until gamma rays flip a bit and the code becomes `kill
| !weeds`
| yetihehe wrote:
| Nah, they would be cultivated and breed for other texts or be
| driven to extinction like those trees which evolved numbers
| https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Counting_pines
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I stopped reading at "Farming robot kills 100k" and ran to my
| prepper basement.
| skapadia wrote:
| Or evolves the weeds to grow their own lasers.
| anthk wrote:
| Just a shinning/mirrory-silvery leaf.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| If they can make it a little bit more robust, there would be a
| huge market for removing toxic plants. I was just quoted over
| $1000 to remove poison ivy from a 500 sq ft. wooded area of
| property. My satisfaction was not guaranteed.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Just buy or rent a goat. Those things love poison ivy.
| Balgair wrote:
| Well now you've done it.
|
| Why use lasers when we can genetically engineer goats to hate
| the taste of corn/sorghum/wheat and love the taste of weeds?
| kyteland wrote:
| That's basically how tea cultivation has historically
| worked. If you let a goat loose on a tea field it will eat
| literally everything but the tea plants.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| That's honestly a billion dollar idea. Or modify the stalks
| of those plants to be extremely bitter. Goats already love
| the taste of weeds and would select for them.
|
| Grazing animals would eat the weeds and naturally
| fertilizer the land. No harm if they don't totally kill the
| weed, more food to fatten them up.
| Balgair wrote:
| It's probably a cheaper idea too, well in terms of
| development costs. The trade off is that it'll take
| longer to prove out. Just get a farm and a good enough
| lab for goat/sheep/chinchilla/etc germ-line modification
| and prove it out over a few generations. Minus the salary
| and feed costs, it'll probably be less than the laser
| itself.
|
| Granted, that's just a billion dollar idea. The multi-
| billion dollar idea is, as you said, to modify the animal
| _and_ the plant together. The goats hate some taste in
| the corn, and the corn produces the taste such that
| humans cannot taste it. Maybe it 'll ripen after harvest
| and the taste will lessen. I dunno. This way you can
| double-dip and charge the farmers on the new plant
| varietals and the goats. Bonus points if you can modify
| the goats to produce milk that's got vitamin-D in it or
| something.
|
| I've seen this set-up in Victoria and SA before. The
| goats eat the grasses/weeds that grow in-between the
| grapes of vineyards. I've no idea if the goats eat the
| grapes every once in a while. The wine grapes are pretty
| sour and bitter to us humans at least.
|
| It would be very 'green' overall.
| cameron_b wrote:
| 10x for developing the timing system by which you don't
| need to engineer either plant or animal and you graze the
| fields before the tender plant is planted. Thus reducing
| your inputs 100-fold or more and reducing your risk model
| and PR spend to sell the engineering to the world.
| carols10cents wrote:
| Yeah, my first thought was whether we can we have these robots
| working continuously on the knotweed that's taking over
| everywhere.
| [deleted]
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| This most likely wouldn't be safe for poison ivy removal.
| Burning poison ivy creates a toxic cloud. As much as poison ivy
| isn't fun, poison ivy in your throat and lungs is even less
| fun.
| SamBam wrote:
| Presumably the laser wouldn't be setting the whole plant up
| in smoke. Couldn't it target the base and let it fall?
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| My understanding of poison ivy is that no part of the plant
| is nontoxic. Burning just the base would minimize the toxic
| cloud, but not eliminate it.
| SamBam wrote:
| I really don't think that burning a line an inch long and
| 1/16th of an inch thick at the bottom of a stem is going
| to release any significant amount of toxic cloud. A tiny
| bit if you're right there next to it, sure, but it would
| be dissipated within a few minutes.
| timbre1234 wrote:
| You need to think more "hit it with enough energy to break
| cell walls and kill the weed" and not "burn it in fire like a
| SciFi movie.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The robot has nobody near it. Toxic clouds would burn with no
| ill effect to humans.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I am wondering why carbon dioxide lasers are the choice, and not
| something like an articulated arm with a monofilament string
| trimmer (a/k/a weedeater) on the end. Seems simpler, cheaper,
| easier to maintain?
| myself248 wrote:
| Precision aim, versus a spinning trimmer that cuts a whole
| swath. The inverse kinematics of the system are a lot easier.
|
| Distance. The laser and aiming mirrors can all be up in the
| body, while the beam reaches the dirty work.
|
| Energy efficiency. It might be that the total energy to bring a
| motor up to speed and swing the arm at the weed may be greater
| than a brief zap with a laser, even if the instantaneous power
| of the laser is much higher.
|
| Certainty. A string trimmer takes a certain amount of nuance to
| start gently so you don't bog down the string, advance through
| the weed, and understand when it's done. A laser can just run
| at a fixed power and scan speed, and almost certainly produce
| the desired results.
|
| Frickin' lasers. There's PR value to that.
| latch wrote:
| slower?
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| Generally solid state decides are cheaper to maintain.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| s/decides/devices/ ??
|
| I grant solid state is more reliable, but when it fails it's
| often a replace not repair situation, which could be more
| expensive.
|
| And the lasers will still have moving parts right? They have
| to aim themselves at the weeds.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I bet it could also be tuned to zap destructive insects without
| need for pesticides.
| ermik wrote:
| I'm not a weed, noooooo...
| stretchwithme wrote:
| Robots will eventually kill bugs too.
|
| Once they get small enough, homes will one day have insect-sized
| robots in the walls preventing termite and other insect
| infestations. But maybe without lasers.
| pvorb wrote:
| It's difficult to prove you wrong. It takes forever to do so.
| frankzander wrote:
| Better farming methods and farmers will probably not need such
| and invention. I think about no drill farming. This "weed
| problem" comes from a farming not going with but against the
| nature. So it's thought that technology will solve problems which
| are no problems if methods to farm are optimized.
| adwn wrote:
| > _This "weed problem" comes from a farming not going with but
| against the nature._
|
| All farming is "going against nature", by definition.
|
| Take a 100m by 100m field and let it go "with nature" for 10
| years. Do you think it'll magically sprout tons of wheat? It'll
| be great for plants and animals, that's for sure, but we can't
| eat what will be growing there.
| Cd00d wrote:
| I think you're ignoring non-native species that can overwhelm
| an ecosystem. There's no going with nature with those "weeds".
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Surely there will always be wild plants (weeds) that compete
| with cultivated plants for sunlight, no?
| frankzander wrote:
| if you mange the cover weeds than they compete with the
| unwanted weeds.
| ashtonbaker wrote:
| I'm all about regenerative agriculture, permaculture, etc. But
| I've never seen a solution to weeds other than to spend a lot
| of manual labor removing them. Is there a method that reduces
| the number of weeds that appear, or reduces the need to remove
| them? I tend to think that solutions like this offer the
| possibility of the best of both worlds - automated (and
| therefore scalable) agriculture without the chemical
| dependency.
| janglytim wrote:
| What about using animals to help with weed control[1], for
| example ducks used in rice paddies[2] or weeder geese?
|
| Also mulching and growing cover crops alongside and in
| succession with our crops [3] prevents weeds without as much
| labor as traditional wedding. For example planting clover
| around crops, which stays short and fixes nitrogen while
| competing with weeds.
|
| I wish we would spend more time rethinking our industrial
| farming practices, rather than try to prop them up with
| diesel burning robots.
|
| [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236942635_Grazin
| g_A... [2] https://web-
| japan.org/trends01/article/021022sci_r.html [3]
| https://eorganic.org/node/2535
| ashtonbaker wrote:
| The link at [1] seems to be mostly about "pasture and
| rangeland weed control" with limited applications to
| forestry and crops. The examples for those are good, but
| seem at a glance application-specific. The most general
| recommendation for crops is to use animals during the
| pasture rotation of a plot to reduce weed pressure during a
| growing rotation.
|
| [2]: Again, great, but very crop-specific.
|
| [3]: I've seen/used mulching on permaculture farms, and it
| seems like a fairly effective method. Also has the benefits
| of reducing the need for water, and regenerating topsoil
| via decomposition. But labor-intensive. The clover idea is
| very interesting and new to me.
|
| > I wish we would spend more time rethinking our industrial
| farming practices, rather than try to prop them up with
| diesel burning robots.
|
| Agree wholeheartedly! And if the answer is that more labor
| is required to farm sustainably, then I'm personally all
| for that. But I'm also pragmatic, and if we could improve
| the economics of sustainable farming by automating some of
| the manual labor, I think that would be great. I'm not sure
| this specific robot addresses that - it seems designed for
| industrial monoculture farms - but it's an interesting idea
| to me.
| frankzander wrote:
| You never see one but there is one: cover weeds. Weeds are
| only grow where the soil is uncovered. In small scale you
| also can mulch with compost but in large scale you need other
| ways. One benefit of a covered soil is more moisture in the
| soil even in dry climates.
| kstenerud wrote:
| No-till farming still requires weed removal. This robot would
| potentially eliminate the needs for herbicides.
| frankzander wrote:
| how come if you cover the soil with cover weeds?
| tpm wrote:
| Weeds are any plants competing for resources with the current
| crop. They will have to managed some way, hopefully with less
| negative externalities than in the current industrial
| monocultural farming.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Given where ML and CV are today, I'd bet on open source models
| trained on weeds within 3-5 years. This company can scale, but
| their unit price is going to plummet. Also, it sounds like
| they're using cameras, where it's concievable that other future
| sensors could be more efficient. An iteration of this with higher
| resolution cameras and small flying drones seems like an
| intuitive next step.
|
| This is a super interesting problem because the confusion matrix
| (fp/fn/tp/tn) rate that makes this economical is going to be
| variable across both crops, and market demand.
|
| If there suddenly there was a demand jump for peas, you could
| afford to use a model with less accuracy, because you are
| optimizing betwee a sunk labor cost and margin on your yield. You
| could literally tune your detection parameters based on futures
| price data, since if if prices were high, you could optimize
| compute on your model. Anyway, spoken as a total outsider, but
| what a cool and interesting set of problems.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I don't think you really need AI/CV if you have multispectral
| or full-spectrum imaging. Different species will have different
| absorption/emission at multiple wavelength. This makes it easy
| to identify crops, and seems to be commonly used for aerial
| imaging[1-3].
|
| That kind of sensor is expensive though, and while you could
| probably do it for cheap with something like a DLP wheel (edit:
| or an array of different light emitters) plus a B/W camera, ML
| might be more price-effective, though probably more error-
| prone, so it isn't a given if you want a high match rate.
|
| Also, isn't this a fire hazard?
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspectral_imaging#Agricult...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multispectral_image
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-spectrum_photography
| goodpoint wrote:
| > you have multispectral or full-spectrum imaging
|
| ...that's exactly what CV needs to handle.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Well, right, but it doesn't need particularly impressive
| algotithms to achieve something with that data. Those
| algorithms were here 20 years ago, with less processing
| power and camera resolution.
| goodpoint wrote:
| A lot of modern ML is not that impressive either.
|
| I can imagine discriminating species of a hundred leaves
| in a very high resolution images to be very challenging.
|
| The leaves are 3-dimensional objects can be twisted,
| tangled, curled up, broken, half rotten, sunburnt...
| sjburt wrote:
| I think the AI solution is actually pretty well proven. I use
| PlantNet to identify weeds in my yard and it's plenty
| accurate and doesn't require any sort of advanced sensor.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Could be, but having more discriminating data as an input
| can only improve speed and accuracy. I don't know what
| technology they picked for the first iteration, but can
| only imagine they'll end up using every trick in the book
| going forward.
|
| A slightly more advanced sensor or lighting apparatus
| wouldn't cost much more, proportionately to the cost of the
| whole system.
| riskable wrote:
| > This makes it easy to identify crops
|
| ...until they evolve to emit the same spectrum of light as
| the crops being harvested! Cuz you know that's going to
| happen.
| _nalply wrote:
| Bacteria and viruses do that, but weeds first don't
| reproduce as fast and second humans can see them and find
| out something like treating crop seeds with fluorescent
| color.
| Retric wrote:
| That's a slow process, further you can always rotate
| between crops with different spectra.
| delfinom wrote:
| It sounds like a slow process but plant life cycles are
| yearly compared to 20+ years for human generations to
| spawn, it will happen faster than you think. There are
| already round up resistant weeds and it's only been 50
| years.
| Retric wrote:
| Even 30 years after first implementation would be several
| generations of better hardware and software. Spectra is
| just one way to get v1 out the door, there are many ways
| you can improve things.
|
| Crops are planted in a specific pattern, at a specific
| time, grow at a specific rate, and have a unique shape.
| So you have a lot of information to work with.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Well, that's right, and I didn't think of it. But besides
| what the sibling comments pointed out, that's an issue with
| _any_ kind of weeding, including manual.
|
| The answer is to select according to a wide range of
| criteria, and not rely on a single one. That way, weeds
| cannot progressively acquire resistance, and need to check
| all the boxes at once, which makes it highly unlikely that
| they will pass on their "slightly better" genes.
|
| And of course, the larger the scale you employ a single
| weeding system at, the more risky it gets. It would be
| great for supplementing herbicide (while lowering doses) at
| first, for instance.
| ticklemyelmo wrote:
| This is the part where Monsanto starts engineering crops
| to fluoresce in a particular frequency of light, so you
| can target weeds inversely.
| kps wrote:
| We just need the weedbots to test plants for flavour and
| nutritional value; cf. xkcd.com/810
| atat7024 wrote:
| Eventually, the only organisms that remain will be
| mutualistic ones, if we do it right.
| OldManAndTheCpp wrote:
| This is a known process already
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
|
| Examples of this are Rye and Oats.
| piyh wrote:
| Drones do not seem like a logical step for me. I'm not a laser
| expert, but seems like the energy storage needed to kill
| hundreds to thousands of something with light is heavier than
| flying would realistically allow. Wheels and tracks are what
| farming is built around, no need to literally reinvent the
| wheel here.
| pkdpic_y9k wrote:
| Good point, but you havent thought of the *millions of tiny
| mirrors* they'd obviously be using :)
| amelius wrote:
| One mirror mounted on the drone would be enough. And a
| strong enough laser device at a stationary position. Of
| course, the challenge would be to hit the mirror and not
| the drone ...
| SamBam wrote:
| They'd probably just use rare-earth magnets.
| silasb wrote:
| Tethered drones might work.
| slt2021 wrote:
| agricultural drones run on gasoline and have plenty of energy
| esrh wrote:
| To me that message implied weed recognition and marking with
| drones followed by destruction with the cube.
| hu3 wrote:
| That's my understanding too but what about precision?
|
| Both the drone and the ground robot would need milimiter
| precision geolocation to coordinate otherwise the laser can
| miss the weed.
| abakker wrote:
| RTK GPS has +/- 3cm Lat/long precision. That gets you
| very close, and then with a confirming camera, you could
| aim and fire.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| No they don't. They need fairly coarse tracking (A few
| feet or so.) for geolocation as that is only to make sure
| you end up covering the whole field.
|
| Now for individual weeds you need precise aiming but
| that's only from a few feet away at max.
|
| The overall geo location boils down to being able to
| track a row as you go down it and then go to the next row
| at the other end. The lasers don't care about the geo
| location at all.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Unless you have a precise map of all the weed locations,
| precise location in absolute world coordinates doesn't
| seem too important. You'd need fairly precise and
| accurate relative positioning from tank to drone and
| drone to weed, though. Drone to weed could be done via
| camera (you need to detect the weed anyway), but tank to
| drone would likely be a difficult engineering problem.
|
| A flying drone seems like the wrong way to solve the
| problem, though. For a drone close enough to the ground
| to reliably detect weeds, you'd likely need a multi-
| rotor, a slow flying fixed wing aircraft, or a blimp. A
| multirotor has a huge energy penalty, and a fixed wing
| aircraft or blimp loses the practical gains vs. just
| using a tractor of some sort.
| Igelau wrote:
| Ah, the classic "Death Cube and Tracker Drone" design
| pattern. DCTD for short.
| kickout wrote:
| Drones will be a big player in next 2-10 years (search for
| Rantizo). The more they can operate autonomously the better.
| The small payload size on drones aren't a huge problem if you
| can have 'refilling stations'
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Maybe very small drones with mirrors and cameras and a
| ground-based robotic tank with a laser cannon.
| ping_pong wrote:
| This is an incredibly great idea.
| jadbox wrote:
| I love the image of this in my head, but I can imagine in
| practice that many farms are not on flat terrain where
| there's direct line of sight [fire] for a central station
| to flash a lazer pulse. Perhaps if you had many smaller
| stations with these laser cannons spread about the field
| and each cannon would coordinate with the drone in the
| closest line of sight.
| hawski wrote:
| Indeed a good idea, but I would only hope it would have a
| reliable fail-safe, becaue it would be a little reverse
| GoldenEye.
| [deleted]
| extropy wrote:
| Heat-ray welding Tripods.
| m463 wrote:
| Or it could just fly upside down. maybe add wheels to set
| cutting height :)
| dylan604 wrote:
| The scene from Spies Like Us always comes to mind when
| bouncing lasers around. Or the Real Genius as well. So you
| better be careful using this around corn fields, or we know
| what can happen.
| samatman wrote:
| Completely agree about flying: but I wonder about the wheel.
|
| A spider-carriage walking robot which could step around the
| valuable plants, climb steeper hills, and wouldn't dictate a
| row-and-plow approach to agriculture, that could be pretty
| compelling. Less soil compaction, more flexibility, could
| work inside forested regions as well. It has potential.
| justicezyx wrote:
| DJI has some demonstration of target pesticide spreading
| drone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfdWYztSqUI It's not as
| targeted as laser, and it has residual problem, and requires
| the crop to have resistance, or the pesticide/weedkiller to
| be specifically targeted.
|
| But I think it might be possible to focus sunlight to
| generate energy to kill weeds, not through battery or
| generated electricity.
| nemo44x wrote:
| What about putting them on an electrified wire? String a grid
| of them over the fields for motion and for power. Power the
| grid with solar.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Any kind of wired setup would interfere with other tractors
| they use in the field. Fertilization, and eventually
| harvesting.
|
| I'm not sure why people are inventing more complicated
| solutions when this robot seems to handle the job quite
| well without them. It covers 20 acres in a day, you can
| likely keep 100+ acres weed free continuously without any
| other special gimmicks.
| riskable wrote:
| It stands to reason that if you're going to be running
| wires over the entire field you wouldn't need _flying_
| drones so much as you would need cameras on wheels (like
| they have at football stadiums).
|
| If the camera sees the correct spectra for a known weed it
| can drop down and get a closer inspection then mark the
| spot or just burn the weeds with an attached laser.
|
| I assume the crawler is necessary because--in order for the
| laser to work--the weeds need to be identified very early
| as they emerge from the ground. You might not be able to
| spot them at such an early stage from above without
| expensive optics.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Yes totally agree on the benefits of early detection --
| easier to identify eg. once the desired crop is larger
| than, say 10mm, then just fire the laser on anything
| green that is less than 2mm, adjust those parameters as
| required as the crop matures, also getting them early
| means less laser energy required to kill it, longer
| battery life, larger acreage covered
| bluGill wrote:
| Wire is too expensive for that. You need thick wire to hold
| itself up without posts every few meters, which in turn
| means it is more expensive than the normal house wires. Not
| that it couldn't be done, but it is too expensive.
|
| Now there is opportunity to have one long wire that the
| tractor reels in/out as it makes passes. This isn't a
| flying drone, but that isn't really needed for anything
| other than cool.
| baybal2 wrote:
| No, wire gantry would be very much ok for this solution.
|
| You don't need wires to be that rigid for that.
| eloff wrote:
| Drones also have poor flight time to recharging time ratio.
| Which means you need more of them to get the job done.
|
| Farms are designed to be serviced by farm vehicles. A vehicle
| makes a lot of sense.
| cwkoss wrote:
| If they were able to make drones work, it could open up
| more variable farm designs: rows are mostly necessary so
| that farms can be serviced by vehicles.
|
| Polyculture farming could become much more economically
| feasible if drones could weed out all non-whitelisted
| species.
|
| Would also be a great boon to forestry: would be awesome to
| make a bunch of drones to fly through forests and zap any
| non-native invasive species it sees.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >If they were able to make drones work, it could open up
| more variable farm designs: rows are mostly necessary so
| that farms can be serviced by vehicles.
|
| Sure, but the weedkiller isn't the only vehicle that
| needs to work on the farm. I don't think flying drones
| are going to be ploughing any time soon.
| canadianfella wrote:
| You think drones are going to harvest food?
| bri3d wrote:
| Drones don't need to be battery operated - but, I agree
| that there is no reason to use them in fields which are
| already designed for vehicle access with semi-standardized
| dimensions.
| eloff wrote:
| If they're fuel powered drones, they need to refuel. Plus
| that's potentially expensive to operate depending how
| many you need and how heavy they are.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| There's probably something to be said for hard-wired
| drones here. The weight of the cable is something you
| have to contend with, but with a physical wire you can
| run a larger drone longer.
| eloff wrote:
| How is that better than a wheeled drone dragging a giant
| orange extension cord behind it?
|
| I'm not sure that's a great idea either, but flying
| brings more problems than it solves in this problem
| space.
| Arrath wrote:
| I would see the drones being used to help map weed
| concentration and optimize the route/efficiency of the weed
| killing robot, not using drones to kill the weeds.
|
| There are already solutions that use drone photogrammetry to
| map crop health, ground coverage and so on. It feels like a
| logical next step to use a drone to assist mapping the best
| route/find problem areas to target for the weed-roomba.
| delfinom wrote:
| >I would see the drones being used to help map weed
| concentration and optimize the route/efficiency of the weed
| killing robot, not using drones to kill the weeds.
|
| That's a ridiculous solution to a non-existent problem. The
| robot literally has no rush to go to the weeds. It can
| crawl along the field by itself 24/7. Throw in a solar
| panel charging station and you literally have free energy
| for it to piss away.
|
| Instead you want to add complexity to the setup, increase
| maintenance costs and potentially shorten the lifespan of
| the system.
| jcims wrote:
| It's not ridiculous at all, hours count. I haven't looked
| at the article, but I'm assuming it's the same machine,
| it's a 10,000 pound unit with tiny little tires and a 75
| hp diesel engine. It's going to compact the soil, get
| stuck, and waste fuel driving around looking for weeds.
|
| If sending a 20 pound gas drone with a 2 TB solid-state
| drive and 60 FPS 4K camera on it up and down the field
| for one 100th of the fuel consumption once a week saves
| 500 hours a year off that beast, it'd probably be worth
| it.
| IanCal wrote:
| That does depend on how much area it can cover per day.
|
| If it covers all your land in under a day, sure. If not,
| then route planning may mean you can have _one_ rather
| than _two_ or more of these very expensive machines.
|
| It's not a drasticly complex addition, and mapping weeds
| with drones appears to be a use of them already.
| kickout wrote:
| Ok thank you. Common sense on non-programming topics on
| HN is more rare than I would like. You clearly understand
| the problem better than most
| Balgair wrote:
| > Also, it sounds like they're using cameras, where it's
| concievable that other future sensors could be more efficient.
|
| Bit of a pedantic note:
|
| What other sensor _could_ you use?
|
| I'm grasping at straws (pun not intended) to figure out any
| other modality that could work as well in a giant field of
| psuedo-randomly mixed plants with the wind blowing chemical
| signatures all about.
| SamBam wrote:
| I think the question was just visible light cameras vs other
| wavelengths.
|
| With visible light, all you have to go on is small
| differences in shades of green and shape of the leaves. With
| other spectra you'd have more cues.
| metaobject wrote:
| Perhaps he just meant IR sensors? Also, I wonder whether UV
| sensors would be helpful.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i'm sure i'm oversimplifying but if you can reliably identify
| your crop then everything else is a weed. Maybe put some kind
| of GMO marker that makes what you want to keep stick out like
| a sore thumb then you just nuke everything else.
| Frenchgeek wrote:
| If you know where your crops are, everything else is a
| weed.
| cameron_b wrote:
| This is the traditional approach and it really blows my
| mind that so many hammer-syndrome AI/ML/flavor-of-the-
| month VC spenders haven't simply gone to see for
| themselves what works on farms. It probably doesn't even
| register to the casual observer, but planting a careful
| row of tomatoes with the root ball in a particular
| direction is a fit for the cultivator tool to come by and
| turn the soil up on the stem of the young, but now
| established plant.
|
| That's actually the "weed control at scale" developed in
| conjunction with the tractor.
|
| I'm not a fan of modern conventional agriculture. The
| abuse done to topsoil is terrible, and we need better
| systems. But new systems need to keep their eye on the
| ball and the ball is a John Deere pulling a 40-foot
| cultivator across a field while the "operator" reads
| twitter ( or <verb>s Clubhouse ) only looking up to mind
| the turns.
|
| Everything starts somewhere, but just because your tech
| has ML and Laserbeams doesn't mean it passes the tool/toy
| test.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| I assume they mean "visible spectrum" when they say cameras,
| because that's what most off-the-shelf systems are tuned to.
|
| A spectrometer is a single pixel camera, I guess, but it
| isn't being used with imaging optics, and it isn't being used
| to stitch together a photograph.
|
| In a general case you could embed some version of GFP instead
| of glyphosate resistance. Then you can set the system loose
| (within the field, lol) to actively interrogate plants,
| zapping intruders that fail their scans.
| kickout wrote:
| Don't think there will be a need to bio-tag weed versus no
| weed. Current tech and sensors can probably get to 2-3 9s
| worth of accuracy (bonus, you don't care about accidently
| hitting/killing a false positive or two, there are many
| plants if this is a commodity crop)
| dylan604 wrote:
| I wonder if Monsanto seeds will start producing a
| signature that could be recognized. This will help in 2
| ways. First, more easily identify those pesky farmers
| using their seeds without proper licensing. Second, help
| the machines know what plants to keep, and the ones to
| remove.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'd like a lawnmower sized one for my yard!
| JUNGLEISMASSIVE wrote:
| Whether it's open source or scalable is irrelevant if the
| technology actually works as advertised, and can be applied to
| pest control in addition to weeds.
|
| The incentive is just too great for Bayer, Syngenta, Monsanto,
| BASF and Corteva (Dow / DuPont) to lobby this technology to
| oblivion.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I wonder at what point it becomes economically feasible to
| breed crops that are more distinguishable from weeds?
|
| After all, this is what we did with chemical weedkillers.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| I wondered about the corollary - at what point does selective
| pressure create a weed that's indistinguishable from a crop?
| intergalplan wrote:
| I doubt weeds will be able to maintain advantages that let
| them compete well to begin with, while also evolving to
| evade _all_ of a series of detection techniques that will
| be added as they evolve their way around the first few. To
| stick around they need to survive well _outside_ of fields,
| too, and I 'd expect detection-resistant varieties to
| become increasingly inefficient at surviving in areas where
| they're not being lasered to death.
| ajarmst wrote:
| I'm not sure that "killer robots with lasers that can be field-
| trained to identify specific targets" would be quite the
| blessing that everyone seems to think.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Why do your weeds have 2 eyes, a nose, and a mouth in all of
| the training libraries?
| exabrial wrote:
| Actually, the next most logical version is an implement that
| runs off the PTO drive of a tractor, not drones. One needs to
| piggyback off existing infrastructure, not replace it.
|
| My high school summer job actually was helping with wheat
| harvest. You can only work when it's hot as you get better
| prices on the harvest.
|
| There were certain kinds of weeds that really clog the combine
| (usually ragweed, not a huge problem in the early summer, but
| weird things happen) or cause damage to the cutting head
| (invasive brush/tree species). We walked the field and pulled
| anything really bad out.
|
| Talk about a way to earn $25/day. You only finished when the
| equipment was put up for the night.
| hourislate wrote:
| Open Source models don't need to be trained on weeds. They need
| to be trained on whatever product is being grown. Everything
| else can be zapped regardless of what kind of weed it is.
| swiley wrote:
| Commodity drown with high powered laser for killing things
| based on image recognition sounds like sci-fi dystopia.
| protomyth wrote:
| I know a lot of farmers that would respond very well to
| having "laser weed killer" as a product. I get the feeling
| the video feed would be amazing. Throw in pest killing and
| you own the market.
|
| Although I keep thinking the movie Runaway (1984) is going to
| be a much truer representation of reality than I would like.
| ourmandave wrote:
| All roads lead to Skynet, some less obvious than others.
| dkarl wrote:
| Yeah, I imagine massive overuse on "pest" species. Mosquito
| eradication will be a high priority for such technology, but
| there will be people who modify it to eradicate everything
| that flies or crawls. Everything smaller than a cat, if they
| could.
|
| I think lasers for killing large animals (including us) will
| be prohibitively expensive for a long time to come, fingers
| crossed.
| shantara wrote:
| Unfortunately, you don't need that much power to
| permanently blind a human.
| dash2 wrote:
| Don't worry. The robots can use machine guns like the rest
| of us.
| stevespang wrote:
| Bill Gates was already involved in a startup to radar
| identify and kill mosquitos with lasers . . . guess it did
| not go well.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| It resulted in a prototype that apparently cost $50 per
| unit, but no retail product yet.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser
| atat7024 wrote:
| Are there massive amounts of retail products in, say,
| Africa?
| martin_a wrote:
| Just don't step on the field and you won't be mistaken for a
| rat and be zapped.
| DennisP wrote:
| True, but it seems less dystopian than soaking vast fields
| with millions of pounds of neurotoxins, like we do today.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Those neurotoxins are perfectly safe. You can drink a cup
| of glyphosate and you'll be fine. There are no long term
| side effects, and sure the only studies are carried out by
| the manufacturer, but we know we can trust them.
|
| Sound crazy? Now, pretend it's an injection.
| sushid wrote:
| Then you drink a cup of glyphosate. Even folks on payroll
| spewing that nonsense would never entertain the thought
| of actually going through with it.
| burnished wrote:
| Hey, I get it, needles are scary. You don't need to make
| stuff up to justify a completely rational fear of getting
| jabbed with a needle.
| linuxftw wrote:
| I'm not concerned about the needle, only what's coming
| through it, approved by an entirely captured regulatory
| body.
| le-mark wrote:
| It doesn't need to recognize every possible weed species, just
| "crop of interest / not crop of interest". A much simpler but
| still valuable task.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| A real world useful variant of Not Hotdog.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14636228
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| That was my first thought as well.
|
| My second thought was, "Please nobody invent a drone that
| shoots lasers at 'not hotdog'".
| jmchuster wrote:
| That's what made sense for my company; we just identify the
| crop, and then churn up all the areas of dirt that are "not
| crop". Also, hey, free cultivation. Do it often enough, and
| your weeds never even get that large, which also greatly
| increases your identification accuracy.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I wonder why it can't it be done via location? Where we
| planted, vs where we did not plant.
| shepting wrote:
| This is the comment I came here for.
|
| I had a professor in college who was building self-driving
| tractors and would come in every other week complaining
| about John Deere this, or Case that, trying to steal his
| business with more expensive solutions. It turns out you
| can use GPS for a rough location and a fancy $200 gyroscope
| for millimeter precision. Then just plant the seeds on an
| exact grid and you know that anything not on the grid is a
| weed.
|
| And actually, his suggestion was to use high-pressure water
| jets to cut the weeds instead of lasers. It would/could be
| less energy-intensive.
| thruflo22 wrote:
| RTK GPS is used as a second factor to vision in these
| machines. It's just not good enough to target with as a
| sole / primary factor in the real world though. Bit of
| drift and whoops, $30,000 of crop gone.
|
| Lasers are not used because they're expensive and
| dangerous. And Co2 lasers (as per the machine in the
| article) are powerful but super fragile.
|
| Water shooting around at high pressure is in no way
| efficient or easy to handle.
|
| Compressed light is the technology that's actually going
| to be used for precision weeding. It has the speed, power
| and simplicity of lasers, without the cost and danger: ht
| tps://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:6789979772471
| 5...
| NortySpock wrote:
| Thanks for posting this, very interesting. The linkedin
| profile pointed to a youtube video (unlisted) that was
| pretty interesting and covered how they could calculate
| eye safely using simple math that indicated the safe
| distance was 2 meters away. They appeared to be using
| blue LEDs at high intensity to char-or-inactivate weed
| photosynthesis.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnL3zYhBlVs
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Its like cabling or rails have never been used before to
| guide a machine along its intended path. Alternatively,
| markers could be placed at planting.
| gbasin wrote:
| Hot dog, no hot dog?
| RHSeeger wrote:
| My first thought was that ML-guided flying drones with laser
| weapons seems like it could be catastrophic is hacked. Imagine
| someone changed the drones to recognize humans (or, assuming
| the lasers can't hurt a human normally, the eyes of automobile
| drivers) as valid targets.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| >An iteration of this with higher resolution cameras and small
| flying drones seems like an intuitive next step.
|
| The gimbal alone on your flying drone will cost more than the
| entire river.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Non-engineer speculation. Seems like drones might have the
| potential to make it cheaper? What if the laser was tower
| mounted and the drones just were there as a camera and
| reflector and to verify clear line of sight? I guess that
| would only really work well when the plants are small...
| mrwaffle wrote:
| sub /weeds/humans/
| MattRix wrote:
| It seems like a good idea, but won't many types of weeds just
| grow back if you don't also remove their roots?
| XorNot wrote:
| It's non-pesticide though, so you can just run it continuously
| and keep lasering the regrowth as well. Eventually the roots
| will run out of energy.
| pjmorris wrote:
| That's not a problem for the people selling the robot.
| adwn wrote:
| > _That 's not a problem for the people selling the robot._
|
| Yes, I'm sure their customers will buy expensive machines
| that don't work. Haha, farmers are dumb, am I right?
|
| Ugh.
| pueblito wrote:
| It depends upon the weed. A lot of weeds depend upon a first
| mover advantage of sorts to gain height, so they're all-in on
| reaching that height. If you cut them, they lack reserves to
| regrow or the flexibility to branch out etc. That's why mowing
| your yard is so effective at keeping weeds down. I live in a
| desert part of Colorado, and for my yard I find simply watering
| heavily is enough to kill most weeds because they're evolved to
| drink all they can when they can.
| 99_00 wrote:
| I'd settle for a manually operated laser to zap weeds.
| damsta wrote:
| I like it. It is huge, expensive, hard to get, probably requires
| perfectly leveled field, but it is only third generation and one
| step closer to reduce dangerous chemicals used on crops. They
| sold out all of their bots they had available for 2021 delivery,
| so hopefully they can work on next generations that will be
| cheaper and more accessible.
| gvb wrote:
| So, looking at the video and "press release" with a jaundiced
| eye...
|
| What is that big unpainted aluminum box sticking out the front?
| Why is it sticking out the front? It makes the machine look like
| a prototype, not a production machine. Aren't they "for sale but
| sold out?"
|
| The video section subtitled "The bedtop is scanned to detect
| weeds in realtime" https://youtu.be/vSPhhw-2ShI?t=58 is ...odd.
| The two camera shots on the left show just weeds (top) and just
| onions (bottom). One would expect the "before" camera to show
| both weeds and onions. The "after" camera shows only onions so
| the machine must be 100% effective. /s
|
| In the same shot, the ground under the machine does not look like
| it has _any_ onions and it looks like it has only a few weeds,
| many fewer than the "weeds" camera shows. You can see "sparks"
| where the machine is presumably lasering weeds, but there are
| many weeds under the machine that survive the "weeding".
|
| The press release
| https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210413005415/en/Car...
| is oddly interesting too. Only one farmer is quoted. (Only one? I
| though the production machines were all sold out. Where are the
| other farmers who bought machines?) The quote is pretty specious
| and his qualifications to judge the machine is very vague "[he]
| has utilized Carbon Robotics' technology on his farm." So he
| apparently does not own a production machine. "Utilized" is a
| very nebulous term - could mean he used it to weed his fields
| (mmmmm yeah) or the company used his field to run tests on the
| machine (seems more likely).
|
| I love the summary quote of Mr. Johnson: "These robots work with
| a variety of crops, are autonomous and organic. The sky's the
| limit." Doe people actually talk that way? No farmer _I_ know
| talks like that. Sounds to me like something a PR flak wrote.
|
| Back to the original article... "Even farmers who can afford to
| buy the robot might not be able to get their hands on one for
| some time -- Carbon Robotics has already sold out of the bots it
| had available for 2021 delivery." I'm guessing the number of bots
| it had available for 2021 delivery is zero, in which case the
| statement isn't quite a lie.
| gouggoug wrote:
| Not to mention the robot looks like a 3D rendering...
| dalbasal wrote:
| Framing this as "One Robot vs One Person" is such lazy silliness.
| It genuinely means nothing.
|
| At some point, this kind of framing was probably easier for an
| average reader to understand... IDK when that stopped being the
| case, but it's not recent.
|
| In any case, this kind of tech is potentially interesting. Weeds,
| pests and other agricultural issues can usually be solved
| biologically (eg weeds get eaten, outcompeted, etc.), chemically
| (eg roundup) or mechanically (someone pulls the weed). We've long
| been leaning on chemical way too heavily.
|
| If/when robotic weeding is available, the economics may be pretty
| compelling. If it takes off, it will almost certainly open a lot
| of unexpected opportunities. Genuinely important agg-tech, IMO,
| can be approximated by how it affects a given farm. If you are
| still, broadly, farming the same types of crops in the same ways
| then it's incremental. Most commonly today, incremental advances
| mean growing slightly different cultivars paired with
| complimentary fertilizers & pesticides. AKA, the Monsanto Way. I
| don't think we're going to make much more progress this way.
| Also, advancing to "Modern Farming" this way is pretty tightly
| couples with corporate farming.
|
| What's potentially interesting about robots like this (if/when
| they're good) is that it may scale down well.
| le-mark wrote:
| Ah man, someone actually built my weed zapper with "weed/not
| weed" AI!
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ACmydtFDTGs
| black_puppydog wrote:
| > The uploader has not made this video available in your
| country.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It's a vignette from an episode of _Silicon Valley_ , in
| which one of the characters demonstrates an "awesome" app
| that can identify a hot dog, from the phone camera.
|
| It does this well.
|
| Unfortunately, the hot dog is the _only_ thing that it can
| positively identify. _Everything_ else is "Not A Hot Dog."
| monkeybutton wrote:
| There's a really good writeup of how the app in the show
| was created:
|
| https://medium.com/@timanglade/how-hbos-silicon-valley-
| built...
| Animats wrote:
| This is only one of many smart weeders.[1] John Deere has "See
| and Spray". There's some unhappiness among farmers that this is
| tied to the "John Deere Operations Center", so the learning part
| is centralized and the machine is dependent upon a paid service.
|
| [1] https://www.agriculture.com/technology/robotics/the-
| future-o...
| Hitton wrote:
| Laser hair removal meets farming.
| karlkloss wrote:
| Better smoke that weed.
| regularemployee wrote:
| can someone enlighten me? I was always taught growing up that
| weeds are good for the soil, they will generally die out once its
| done its job.
|
| Is killing weeds generally used in unsustainable agriculture or
| are there weeds that truly needs to be killed?
| parasanti wrote:
| They use resources that other plants need. They can also
| smother other plants since weeds are fast growing.
| vkou wrote:
| How does it compete with organic farming robots that are paid
| ~$4-6/hour to kill weeds?
| lefstathiou wrote:
| I love the application of lasers to address this problem. I think
| there are a lot of applications for this tech - lasers to kill
| flies in factories and mosquitos in yards. I'm curious if it can
| be used to tackle Australia's field mice problem which is causing
| tens of billions of dollars a year in damage.
| OnlyOneCannolo wrote:
| I don't get why all this ag tech has to be autonomous. Would it
| not also make sense as a trailer or header for a tractor?
| ninju wrote:
| This solution needs to run rather slow (<5mph) which would add
| time to the tractor run
|
| Also it's the autonomous element that allows it run
| continuously (day and night) to accomplish its goal
| klausjensen wrote:
| Labor is expensive in many countries. :)
| OnlyOneCannolo wrote:
| Farmers already drive sprayers to kill weeds, so it's not
| like this would add labor costs. Maybe it's more expensive
| than chemicals, so they needed some other way to be cost-
| competitive.
| mod wrote:
| That was mentioned in the article. Spraying weeds happens
| quite quickly. This vehicle maxes at 5mph so presumably
| hauling it around would take a lot longer.
| kolbe wrote:
| These AI solutions that shoot a laser at weeds or water at a
| squirrel seem to be pointing a straight line towards AI weaponry,
| which makes me a little uncomfortable.
| jerf wrote:
| Oh, don't worry. This is _way_ behind AI weaponry tech.
|
| Err... that's probably not what you wanted to hear, though.
| sldksk wrote:
| "Labor shortages" is a mythical term for wage shortages.
| hosh wrote:
| This sounds like a much more efficient way to practice
| monocropping, enhance fragility, and capture economic value by
| increasing dependence on non-local food sources.
|
| In other news: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/pacific-
| northwest-s-...
| schoen wrote:
| Elsewhere in this thread someone suggested the opposite.
| Presumably you could attempt to implement this either as
| "destroy all species other than C" or as "destroy only species
| W". I don't know how to think about which, if either, this
| approach is more suited to.
| nbardy wrote:
| I'm so tired of these endless orthogonal attacks on technology
| that is aiming to help the environment. Of course things are
| perfect. This could reduce the usage of tons of dangerous
| herbicide.
|
| Go start your own thing instead of lazily smashing others.
| 99_00 wrote:
| Why did you link to an article about pacific northwest
| indigenous forest gardens.
|
| It seems like you are making an implied argument. Not stating
| your argument ensures it can't attacked. Not wanting your
| argument attacked suggests it is weak and won't stand up to
| scrutiny.
| hosh wrote:
| You caught me red handed. I have made explicit arguments
| elsewhere on HN before. It usually involves writing a lot of
| exposition, starting with identifying and deconstruction of
| the default paradigm that some people call "Value
| Extraction". It can get very in involved.
|
| This time, I was adding a subtle sarcasm, which I knew a
| small minority of HN readers will pick up. They are already
| familiar with food forests, restoration agriculture, and some
| may even be familiar with regenerative paradigms.
|
| But let me see if I can condense this into something
| explicit:
|
| Rather than eliminating everything but the monocrop, there
| are alternative forms of agriculture that takes advantage of
| the synergies that come from companion planting, "guilds".
| Specific combination of plants planted together can be put
| together to reduce ecological invasions, or create an
| ecosystem that can produce harvestable food items for most of
| the year. Some combinations can mutually resist pests and
| diseases. Others can be combined to take advantage of
| vertical spaces (canopy layers), or to effectively modify the
| local hardiness and heat zones, or modify wind conditions.
|
| Designing such a thing can get very complex. Some designs,
| however, become so resilient, they continue producing human-
| harvestable food despite being abandoned for over 150 years.
|
| The Pacific Northwest is not the only region where indigenous
| people have used these practices. There is quite a bit of
| anthropological evidence that this is a wide spread practice
| ... what is novel with that article is that _ecologists_ are
| acknowledging that this had happened in the Pacific NW.
| 99_00 wrote:
| >Rather than eliminating everything but the monocrop
|
| No one is suggesting this be done. Fanatical monocropists
| don't exist.
|
| Your argument is based on a false dichotomy. We can make
| monocrop farming more efficient and environmentally
| friendly (eliminate pesticides) while also exploring other
| systems.
| mssundaram wrote:
| > _We can make monocrop farming more efficient and
| environmentally friendly (eliminate pesticides)_
|
| More efficient and environmentally friendly are
| contradictory in terms of monocrop
|
| > Fanatical monocropists don't exist.
|
| Uh what? What about the almost 100 million acres of corn
| in the US?
| hosh wrote:
| And to address the several commentors who say this
| technology is orthogonal to agricultural practices:
|
| An alternative use of ML, CV, and robotics, might be
| something that can observe and identify all the
| participants in an ecosystem, such as food forest, and use
| ML to sketch out the possibility space in which viable
| cross species synergies can enhance an ecosystem. This
| could be used as an aid in designing a food forest.
|
| One use of ML, accelerates ecological degeneration. A
| different use of ML accelerates ecological regeneration. I
| don't think the latter involves a weed killing robot.
| jonas21 wrote:
| The use of this technology is orthogonal to whatever other
| issues you may have with modern agriculture.
|
| Despite growth in organics, 99% of farmland in the U.S. is
| still conventional. Anything that reduces chemical herbicide
| usage on that farmland is a good thing.
| ReadEvalPost wrote:
| The right way to farm is to work with other plants and the
| weeds themselves to regenerate the soil. The idea that weeds
| are pests that need to be eliminated at all costs is
| antithetical to proper regenerative farming. Anything that
| enables or propagates industrial farming is genuinely a bad
| thing that we should not support as technologists, it is not
| at all orthogonal! "A little bit less of a bad thing" still
| leaves us in a bad place.
| hosh wrote:
| Yup, agreed. Speaking to others listening in: some weeds
| are edible, and other functions as part of ecological
| succession. We could be using farming practices that goes
| with that, rather than against it. Instead, industrial
| farming is optimized to produce single crops conforming to
| consumer expectations, cost-efficient harvesting, and
| durability for long transports and storage. Industrial
| farming is not optimized for nutritional value, freshness,
| and resilience against environmental stressors. The system
| by which 8 billion people are fed resembles a Ponzi scheme
| in which we are borrowing against future generations ...
| and with the increased variability in weather and water
| rights wars, it is only going to get more, not less,
| fragile.
|
| Example is the dandelion. Besides having culinary and
| medicinal value, it acts as a pioneer species for depleted
| soil. Killing it with more roundup or zapping it with a
| laser, and then contaminating the land with more fertilizer
| will just encourage more dandelion growth. The land and
| ecosystem is signaling a fertility issue, and our present
| practices work against it.
|
| I say this even though the common mallow is the bane of my
| existence here in the lower Sanoren ;-)
| [deleted]
| canadianfella wrote:
| Killing weeds means more food. There's nothing wrong with that.
| 8 billion people can't survive off picking wild berries.
| mssundaram wrote:
| That was my thought as well. Thanks for sharing the interesting
| article
| hosh wrote:
| Yeah, this robot is an example of tech being utilized to
| extract value. The ML, CV, and robotic tech tickles my inner
| geek, but tech was not designed or deployed in a regenerative
| way. There are many things we can do to have more resilient,
| restorative, regenerative agriculture ... that often don't
| involve much high tech at all.
|
| So what is a more worthwhile use of high tech? Being someone
| in tech and having greatly economically benefited from it,
| I've recently been reframing what I know about software tech,
| startups, innovation with a regenerative paradigm. I am still
| making my way through Carol Sanford's work on regenerative
| paradigms and figuring out a lot of this stuff out. So far:
|
| (1)
|
| Christopher Alexander had introduced the idea of creating
| pattern languages for people living, working, and playing
| within building architecture so that they can modify and
| design their own living spaces. What we ended up with are
| cookie-cutter housing in suburbia. His work greatly
| influenced OOP and Human-Computer-Interface design (see his
| 1996 OOPSLA Keynote) ... and what we ended up with is the
| Gang of Four, Apple products, growth hacks, and "user
| engagement".
|
| What we _don 't_ have are individuals, families, and
| communities having computer tech that can customized _by the
| users_ for what works in their local environment. Smalltalk
| was designed with that intent in mind, but our legacy from
| Smalltalk is the Gang of Four and OOP "design patterns".
|
| (2)
|
| There was a recent article posted here. It was a fictional
| interview, the premise being someone from a parallel world
| where software design was elevated on par with science and
| art, and not merely engineering. They start with a "design
| brief" rather than engineering requirements. I lost track of
| that article.
|
| Just some evolving thoughts.
| mssundaram wrote:
| > _Yeah, this robot is an example of tech being utilized to
| extract value. The ML, CV, and robotic tech tickles my
| inner geek, but tech was not designed or deployed in a
| regenerative way. There are many things we can do to have
| more resilient, restorative, regenerative agriculture ...
| that often don 't involve much high tech at all._
|
| I have this struggle often. Before software engineering, I
| was working on permaculture farms and apprenticed as a
| natural builder (cob mostly).
| fridif wrote:
| Good.
| noxer wrote:
| I still think the idea of having a certain type of weed
| intentionally planted along the crops is better. A symbiosis that
| prevents unwanted plants to grow. Also the weed whatever it is
| can be used to feed animals or turn it into some kind of fuel Or
| it can stay and prevents the solid form going bad in the time
| where nothing grows.
|
| We could probably use high-tech robots to identify the different
| plans and harvest one without damaging the other. Something that
| is currently not possible in large scale farming and thus wont
| allow us to plant different things in the same space.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| I have a feeling that this robot would allow to care for
| multiple plants growing in symbiosis
| noxer wrote:
| The harvest is the problem. It usually done by "destroying"
| almost everything beside whats harvested. Including
| destroying and disrupting the soil and its microorganisms.
|
| Then we "fix" it by adding whats missing aka we use tons of
| fossil fertilizer.
| one_off_comment wrote:
| Can we talk about the industrial design of this thing for a
| moment? It looks like something out of Simon Stalenhag. I don't
| know whether to be excited or terrified.
| detaro wrote:
| I think that's more a sign that Stalenhag has a good eye for
| practical industrial design.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| The next step will hopefully be something on a rail, as I don't
| apreciate diesel either :-)
| v8xi wrote:
| Great news until we get laser-resistant weeds. God help us
| oneepic wrote:
| Or weeds that grow laser cannons to fight back. Might be a
| great alternative to traditional home security systems.
| varispeed wrote:
| I am not easy about those technologies. What stops them to
| retrain it so that it will blind humans who have bad comment
| history on Facebook?
| franga2000 wrote:
| I mean, Michael Reeves on YouTube built 50% of what you're
| talking about with two servos and a pizza box. Just strap the
| whole thing on a Spot from Boston Dynamic (which, concerningly
| enough, Michael also has now) and you're done.
| eof wrote:
| Someone please make one that does mosquitoes
| yetihehe wrote:
| Done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26376376
| kuroguro wrote:
| MS & Intellectual Ventures (2010) https://www.ted.com/talks/n
| athan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_z...
|
| Satisfying slowmo killshots near end :)
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| From what I've read, this technology is still very far away
| from practical deployment and the Intellectual Ventures
| company is notoriously scummy, greedy, and lawsuit happy.
| They won't let anyone else work on this so no one else is
| making progress.
| kuroguro wrote:
| Aww, I really liked the demo too.
|
| Wonder if it would be possible to do a simplified 2D
| version in a window frame or something. Should also
| reduce the risk of burning someone's eyes out.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| That's a really interesting idea. Unfortunately, most of
| Intellectual Venture's patents are broad and apply to
| using a method rather than a specific implementation. In
| other words, it doesn't matter how unique your mosquito
| laser is, the fact that you are using a laser against a
| flying insect is enough of an infringement.
| smachiz wrote:
| I need to borrow this for 1 hour.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Way too small, slow, and expensive to compete with chemical weed
| management in all but the most expensive and manually intensive
| crops.
|
| Burning leaves doesn't reliably kill plants, if you don't pull it
| out by the roots you'll be getting those same weeds back in short
| order.
|
| Certainly progress towards something, but a very expensive
| impractical step for most.
| jarmitage wrote:
| Are there scenarios where this would be more efficient than using
| regenerative agriculture techniques like cover cropping to
| naturally out-compete weeds?
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| You still have to weed with those techniques, especially for
| perennial noxious and aggressive weeds, or else that's all you
| have eventually.
|
| It's not as big of an issue if you have grazing animals,
| because many (such as sheep and goats) will often go after the
| "weeds" first. Pigs will happily take it straight down to the
| earth.
| aurizon wrote:
| It should be doable to have a number of flying mirror platforms
| with scan and ID done centrally and once located kill pulses can
| be sent down. These kills could come via another platform at
| another time once the weed location is known and memorised. It is
| even possible for a small fixed wing drone(with 10x the flight
| duration) to be used. The ID process is a light task and can be
| readily moved from field to field. The laser killer with the
| needed wattage can be trucked from field to field, and use a
| similar flying mirror set to aim/kill from the prelocated
| targets. From what I read about mosquito killing, the tech is
| capable AND plants are not even moving targets. That said, many
| moths and flying beetles are large targets and could be targeted
| and killed to deal with many pests.
| mulmen wrote:
| Are there other benefits to having a robot continuously looking
| at crops? I'm thinking something like monitoring the development
| of the actual crop? Can information on moisture and fertilizer
| levels also be measured or inferred by the same drone? Or maybe
| signs of pests or disease?
|
| Agtech is a fascinating business.
| karol wrote:
| 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.
| f6v wrote:
| 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.
| igammarays wrote:
| > since image recognition is something computers can do on
| par with humans
|
| No way. Computer image recognition is nowhere close to human
| recognition in real-world contexts. Still full of errors and
| bugs.
| contingencies wrote:
| It is very reasonable revisit the assumption that fighting
| nature in this way is a reasonable course of action.
|
| _We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking
| that created them._ - Einstein
|
| There are some promising reports of enhanced agricultural
| outcomes from reduced inputs based on alternative strategies
| such as seedballs, dense intercropping, crop inter-rotation,
| less intense land use and higher biodiversity. Major issues
| with such approaches seem to be homogeneity (required by large
| scale distributors) and difficulties with autonomous harvesting
| or increased labour (increased yields are no good if you can't
| harvest them efficiently).
| imtringued wrote:
| There are worse things that you can do to the soil, things like
| tilling it.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I 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 hitch (where you could power off the PTO of
| the tractor). Seems excessively novel, given most farmers are
| already spending time going up and down the rows cultivating,
| etc. anyways. Adds to the cost, and complexity.
| osigurdson wrote:
| "74-hp Cummins diesel QSF2.8"
|
| https://carbonrobotics.com/features
| maxerickson wrote:
| 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.
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.)
| jfkgktjrnnr wrote:
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The modest engine powering it is 55 kW.
| Balgair wrote:
| People who work in pulsed kW laser labs are all sitting
| here salivating at thought and also horrified at the
| thought.
|
| Salivating because that's a lot of power that you can use
| for experiments, much more than most laser technicians
| have ever seen.
|
| Horrified because not only are you going to go instantly
| blind (as usual), but now the rest of your head will
| smolder too.
| repiret wrote:
| 55kW at 240V is only 230A. A typical house gets 200A
| service. It's a lot of power, but you wouldn't have to
| move mountains to get it if you worked at a lab that
| needed it. It could be had for less than the price of
| many used cars.
| stevespang wrote:
| No wonder they call it CARBON robotics, using CO2 lasers
| and yet still pumping significant amount of combustion
| CO2 into the atmosphere . . .
| boringg wrote:
| Oh it's for sure an energy hog and the 20 acres is marketing.
|
| Super interesting especially think of it as in its infancy.
| Also would be interested to see how the real world results are.
| I'm guessing it can laser all life but I would be curious to
| see how well the algorithm worked with protecting certain
| species.
| gus_massa wrote:
| The video looks like a mix of cgi graphics with unrelated real
| videos, so I guess they don't have a real machine yet.
| defaultname wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJigArURZWU
|
| (Video of an operating unit)
|
| There is nothing particularly unbelievable about the device,
| and it seems, as such innovations tend to be, quite obvious.
| gus_massa wrote:
| It's driving on asphalt in a parking lot. Do they have a
| video of the device following the grooves over mud? (It
| would be not surprising, because other automated tractors
| can do that.)
|
| It would be more interesting to see a video where they fire
| the lasers. Can it aim while moving? Can it aim while the
| engine is on and everything is vibrating?
| onion2k wrote:
| There's a video on YouTube of a walk around.
| https://youtu.be/fK3AQgt47z4 The CEO of the company describes
| it as "an all diesel hydraulic system." Essentially there's a
| big generator to drive it around and provide power to the pew
| pew lasers.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| Farming equipment is typically fuel based. And this appears to
| be the case for this robot as well: it uses Diesel.
| jmacd wrote:
| This is in no small part because of the massive subsidization
| of fuel for farming in most countries. Not only is the fuel
| for agriculture heavily discounted, but what you do pay can
| be written off against your revenues.
|
| Same with most fisheries.
|
| If governments want these sectors to go green, that is going
| to be a very big and painful band-aid to peel off.
| simon1ltd wrote:
| You do realize that deducting the cost of producing a
| product is entirely normal and expected behavior right?
|
| It's not some special loophole.
|
| If you use $1000 of electricity to harvest your crops, that
| $1000 would be equally as deductible because it's just a
| cost of production?
| fortran77 wrote:
| > but what you do pay can be written off against your
| revenue
|
| How is that different from any other business expense in
| any other industry.
| SamBam wrote:
| At that point, is this more environmental than applying
| Round-Up to the field?
|
| Each of these lumbering beasts goes 5 MPH, burning diesel the
| entire time. How many gallons of gas is going to be spent
| weeding a hundred acres of farmland?
| briffle wrote:
| The QSF2.8 Diesel is a Tier 4 Diesel engine, so it is MUCH
| cleaner burning that most tractors out there.
| xxpor wrote:
| How do you think the roundup is applied in the first place?
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Well they are quite different pollutants. Hard to compare
| directly.
| SamBam wrote:
| I know, and the two are often in conflict.
|
| For example, replacing a deforested area might sometimes
| be faster by introducing a non-native invasive species.
| From a carbon perspective it would be a net-good, from an
| ecosystem perspective it would be a net-bad. Which is
| more important?
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Diesel engines can be eventually replaced with overhead
| wires
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| In a field? Not likely.
| tw04 wrote:
| >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 hitch
|
| That doesn't seem odd to me at all. The whole point of this
| thing is to let it run all day killing weeds while you do
| _other stuff_. The fact it only has a max of 5mph (and likely
| significantly slower when there are actual weeds to kill) means
| you would spend all day every day in the field trying to take
| care of weeds.
|
| When they spray for weeds they're going significantly faster
| than that and cover a massive swath in one pass, and that's
| generally outsourced to someone other than the farmer himself.
| This looks like it's good for maybe 3 rows at a time.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > The whole point of this thing is to let it run all day
| killing weeds while you do other stuff.
|
| There's a lot of automated tractors now
| [deleted]
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Yeah. But I wonder if putting it all in one was for better
| coupling between shooting laser control vs the whole cart
| moving around (for example, slowing down/stopping when the
| weed density goes up).
|
| I noticed this thing uses hydraulic drive motors... I
| assume that was so they could run the engine as 'electrical
| first', but I also wonder if it gives them better
| start/stop control of the cart.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Many tractors these days are hydraulic as well.
| tw04 wrote:
| I guess I don't follow what the advantage would be. Putting
| hours and wear/tear on a $250k tractor that you likely have
| other uses for in order to cut what? $10k off the price of
| this for the cummins motor and hydraulics? It would need
| power generation of some sort, so you'd be doing PTO off
| the tractor instead to drive a generator.
|
| I'd imagine the end result would be more fuel and in the
| long run more expense.
| foofoo55 wrote:
| The advantage with tractor-pulled is lower cost and
| higher reliability. The propulsion, guidance, and power-
| supply problem has been dealt with by industry already
| and is already owned by the farmer. The autonomous
| weeding machine will undoubtedly have issues with these
| three functions, which means down-time and cost. The
| machine would be cheaper if tractor-pulled, and the
| developers could focus on the problem at hand. Also, the
| tractor driver could periodically stop to monitor and
| tweak the weed killer, especially important given the new
| technology. We did a recent project with a farming
| implement that could have been autonomous, and when one
| is realistic with reliability and maintenance costs
| (unless one intends a McDonald's ice-cream machine repair
| business model) then the argument for tractor-pulled is
| very strong.
| tw04 wrote:
| >The advantage with tractor-pulled is lower cost and
| higher reliability.
|
| Based on what? The cummins engine they're using is
| bulletproof and a rounding error in the cost of the unit.
| Hydraulic motors will run for 10s of thousands of hours
| without any maintenance beyond a fluid change.
|
| People in this thread keep claiming tractors are fully
| autonomous, which model? If they aren't fully autonomous,
| what farmer is volunteering to spend hundreds to
| thousands of hours in their tractor doing nothing but
| putting along at 5mph stop-and-go while this thing zaps
| weeds?
|
| https://www.protocol.com/john-deere-farming-ai-autonomous
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Thousands... millions of farmers already putting along
| doing nothing but dragging a cultivator / sprayer /
| fertilizer spreader / bush hog / rototiller / weed badger
| / manure spreader etc. etc.
| tw04 wrote:
| I assume you haven't farmed? You don't run any of those
| implements at 5mph with a 3-row spread. It would
| literally be impossible to run a modern farm at those
| speeds and spread.
| kickout wrote:
| My theory is JD,Case already have the tech to be level 4
| autonomous but they haven't figured out how to make more
| revenue than selling $250K quad-tracs with 'some'
| autonomy.
|
| https://thinkingagriculture.io/the-agriculture-unicorn-
| hidin...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 100% agree and that's what my original comment was trying
| to get at.
|
| I can see selling two models, one autonomous, one three
| point hitch / PTO. The advantage of the latter is clear
| to me.
|
| But then the product starts to look a lot less sci-fi,
| doesn't it? We already have pull-behind weed burners that
| use propane torches and not lasers. The only "magic"
| would be in the AI recognition systems (which I have
| questions about.) Perhaps one could not get investment $$
| for it then :-(
|
| Also propane torches seem more efficient to me than
| converting diesel combustion to electricity to heat
| energy.
| bri3d wrote:
| I think the difference is that propane torches are an
| imprecise mechanism generally used to clear dead area
| between planted rows, while this laser based solution
| could be used selectively within a planted row (provided
| it is real at all).
|
| Fully agreed about the 3-point comment though. Why take
| on building an autonomous tractor AND a targeted weed-
| killer, rather than tackling the differentiating problem
| only? Seems like a hype train measure. Or the systems
| integration is very important, in which case a
| partnership would be the obvious route or white-labeling
| an autonomous tractor. Regardless, this strategy seems
| very weird to me too.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Right, which is why I think it's likely a result of VC
| direction. It's not enough to have a profitable or
| sensible product, it has to be something that can sell in
| acquisition for 10 or 100 x the investment given.
|
| "Autonomous vehicles are hot and AI is hot, go with
| that."
| cryptonector wrote:
| I don't see why power would be an issue. Why do you even assume
| there's a huge battery instead of a diesel engine and
| generator?
|
| Having this thing be autonomous makes it more expensive to
| _acquire_ , yes, but way cheaper to _operate_ because the labor
| cost of pulling this thing with a non-autonomous tractor is
| quite large (even if the tractor were autonomous, having two
| autonomous robots doing different things is better than having
| one doing two different things that might halve its
| availability for each kind of task). This is a _very_ big deal.
| If labor were a non-issue we 'd have people weeding manually
| and we'd not use herbicides. Everything in farming is about
| labor, which is why we've gone from being agrarian societies to
| industrial and post-industrial ones: by bringing economies of
| scale to agriculture in order to greatly reduce _labor costs_
| in agriculture.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Maybe it's because the robot needs different amounts of time
| for different patches of soil? As in, it kinda needs to go its
| own pace to a) ensure it has enough time to detect and kill all
| weeds (which depends on weed density, presumably - the video
| shows it only killing one at a time) and b) maybe it has to
| stop to ensure it hits the right thing because it can't handle
| moving targets (not clear from the video)?
|
| No idea if this is something that modern tractors could
| accommodate already or whether it would need some annoying
| human-in-the-loop stop and go.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| The energy usage should be minimal - it doesn't take much power
| to burn a leaf.
|
| If you pull it behind a tractor, you need to hire someone to
| drive the tractor. This defeats the purpose of an autonomous
| weeding system.
| Minor49er wrote:
| > The energy usage should be minimal - it doesn't take much
| power to burn a leaf.
|
| This is certainly true for dry plants. If they're weeds,
| they're actively growing, so they are trapping a lot of
| moisture that could make it hard to burn. If the weeds are a
| problem, then they're going to be growing. Many weeds, too,
| will continue to grow, even if their leaves are damaged or
| removed.
| [deleted]
| Minor49er wrote:
| Instead of a laser, I wonder if it would make sense to use
| positioned lenses and have the robot focus the sun's rays on
| each weed to burn it out. Though that probably would cause
| fires and would only be usable during certain hours of the day.
| ninju wrote:
| > would only be usable during certain hours of the day
|
| Limiting usage to when the light will be strong enough to be
| focused would seriously limit the hours of usage
|
| Maybe adding solar panels to harness solar energy to offset
| ICE emissions would be a consideration
| Minor49er wrote:
| That woukd be a good idea, though wouldn't that notably
| increase the cost of the unit as well?
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| Why would the fire danger be different than the laser?
| Minor49er wrote:
| I could easily be wrong on this, but my understanding is
| that a laser is highly focused to one spot. A lens would
| have a wider spread and would also heat up the area
| surrounding the target to the point that it could ignite.
| tjoff wrote:
| Why would you assume it was electric?
| ransom1538 wrote:
| "I want to see details on power source and energy usage. That's
| where I'm a bit skeptical."
|
| Meh. Worse case you could even have a wire.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Hell, you could probably stick a fuel tank and a generator on
| it if you had to.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Which is basically what they did; upthread, someone links
| to the specs and they have an onboard Cummins diesel
| generator.
| toss1 wrote:
| Check the Features & Specs page [1] 74-hp
| Cummins diesel QSF2.8 4 hydraulic drive motors
| 75-gallon fuel capacity
|
| I'd bet that diesel also powers a generator to run the
| computers and 150W lasers.
|
| [1] https://carbonrobotics.com/features
| garrettgrimsley wrote:
| You'd be dragging that wire over your rows of crops,
| potentially damaging them.
| [deleted]
| fractal618 wrote:
| This is awesome, I love that it will reduce the need for
| pesticides.
|
| When I read people talk about how hard it is to find labor I
| think to myself "Well, maybe if you paid them more it would be
| easier to find laborers". I worked in manufacturing for a few
| years and plant managers were often stating the difficulty in
| finding laborers. I imagine offering higher wages would make it
| easier to find workers. No?
|
| > "It's harder to find people to do that work every single year,"
| vegetable farmer Shay Myers told the Seattle Times.
| kickout wrote:
| Pesticides highly unlikely, herbicides maybe.
| maelito wrote:
| Paying workers more is difficult when the price of food is
| supposed to go or stay down.
| giantrobot wrote:
| The labor cost per unit of produce is pretty small. Even
| doubling wages for harvest and weeding labor wouldn't add
| significantly to the retail cost of produce. Additionally
| farming is _heavily_ subsidized in the US. Modest wage
| increases could and would end up being covered by subsidies
| by getting them rolled into a Farm Bill.
|
| You can bet that a farm that saved money weeding with robots
| wouldn't drop the price of produce reflecting their lower
| costs. Like prices if everything, it's more what the market
| will bear rather than some geometric relationship to
| labor/production costs.
| drited wrote:
| From the perspective of a farm /plant owner with a commodity
| product who is trying to compete internationally that's kind of
| a 'let them eat cake' solution though isn't it (not robotics -
| a wage hike)? Margins can't be much above the minimum to earn
| an OK-ish return on capital in such an industry. If that move
| makes them unprofitable then it's not a viable solution.
| OliverJones wrote:
| Pow! Take that, Monsanto!
|
| This diminishes farmers' dependence on patented "Roundup-ready"
| seeds, and on the Roundup herbicide itself. That can only be good
| for everybody except Monsanto.
| myself248 wrote:
| I'm very surprised Monsanto isn't out there buying and
| slaughtering every such startup, for precisely this reason.
|
| You better believe they're trying _something_ to preserve their
| market, it's just more underhanded than that.
| gus_massa wrote:
| If they believe this approach will work, they are probably
| planning something. For example a new GMO plants that produce
| florescent substance to glow under a low energy laser and
| make it easier to detect them. Don't worry, they will imagine
| a method to continue getting profit.
| ape4 wrote:
| It will be the norm on Mars
| mrits wrote:
| finally, we can solve the Mars weed problem
| tda wrote:
| I really hope this works as good as they claim. Now just mount
| the laser on a Spot so you don't get all the tire tracks. Small
| scale robots, not giant tractors, are the real future of
| agriculture
| fortran77 wrote:
| I don't get this: Big money machine: Myers
| expects the farming robot to pay for itself in two to three
| years, but it does come with a hefty price tag: Carbon Robotics'
| CEO Paul Mikesell told the Seattle Times it costs hundreds of
| thousands of dollars (he declined to provide an exact price).
|
| If it pays for itself in, let's say, three years, then you'd
| think the manufacturer would be eager to finance it over a
| similar period of time.
| mavu wrote:
| Soo.. 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?
| daemonk wrote:
| I wonder if this will put selective pressure on weeds to evolve
| to look like crops.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| or to look like mirrors
| andrewstuart wrote:
| When will killing things no longer be a virtue?
| retro64 wrote:
| This is very cool. Not knowing anything about it though it looks
| massive and overbuilt (with smallish wheels, but likely just fine
| for the time of year it's put to use). Anyone care to speculate
| why it needs such a large body? The width is a given because it
| needs to span the rows, but why a giant cube?
| retSava wrote:
| I assume ventilation is a big factor, big fans to cool the
| lasers. Probably some form of liquid cooling with pumps and
| coolant media tubes and whatnot.
|
| Really cool product!
|
| I think what this product may lack if anything, is some RGB LED
| lighting and a name with X or Z in it, eg "CarbonX LASER-Z".
| Especially now with eSports increasing popularity, perhaps we
| may find eFarmingSports finding a niche, where the most zapped
| weeds per time unit wins.
| gpm wrote:
| It sounds like it's got a generator on board, so it needs
| enough space for that.
|
| There's no sense letting it get rained on, so it needs some
| sort of cap (especially given that it's presumably electric
| high powered lasers).
|
| It doesn't seem to move fast enough to care about wind
| resistance.
|
| A cube is a nice easy shape to build... so why not a cube.
| myself248 wrote:
| I hope future generations will be at least solar-hybrid if
| not entirely solar. It's not like the thing has any shade to
| contend with, after all, and most of its loads are
| electrical.
| gpm wrote:
| I don't think solar panels have energy density high enough
| to make this even remotely plausible. Lasers convert a
| small percentage of the input energy into output energy,
| and you need a lot of energy to burn weeds to death.
|
| Elsewhere in this comment section someone pointed out that
| the generator on this supplies slightly more energy than
| the rated maximum of most houses. It only has a few sq m of
| solar space on it for solar panels... that doesn't seem
| like it will even be a dent.
|
| Like usual, you're better of putting solar panels on the
| ground somewhere. If this thing ever becomes electric I
| think it will have to either be by a wire, or by using
| electricity to convert CO2 back into fuel. Maybe if
| batteries improve a bit by battery, but right now it sounds
| like it would need to spend a large portion of it's time
| recharging (just comparing to electric vehicles).
|
| On the flip side - this might be a great candidate for
| these guys carbon capture technology:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26412624
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| My guess is because it can. Size is not a concern for farming
| and it being large aids cooling and helps to store more energy.
| Apparently it has a 75l Diesel tank for instance.
| zython wrote:
| I wonder if there are any (food) safety concerns blasting high
| powered lazers at living tissue.
| ricksunny wrote:
| Someone on this forum (or another technical forum like slashdot)
| coined something along the lines of "Lasers Just Make Everything
| Better". Wish I could find that quote.
|
| Contextual example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25749015
| ElectricMind wrote:
| Wait till someone pushes "hypocrite commits" replacing string
| "weeds" with "humans". Booyah :)
| boringg wrote:
| Roomba for farming.
| DrOctagon wrote:
| And it only fires the laser once. The fire that starts does the
| rest.
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