- Herbicide is expensive, so there’s an economic incentive to find new ways of week control in addition to health and safety reasons.
- The weeding machine is a beast at almost 10,000 pounds.
- It drives 5 miles/hour and can clear 15-20 acres in a day.
The robotic weeding machine helps farmers weed out their farms through a Lazer guided AI machine that targets the weed and in a matter of hours makes the farm free of weeds, says an article published in Forbes.
What is the issue?
The nutrient content of our vegetables is down 40% over the last two decades and our soil health is suffering due to increasingly harsh herbicide use, according to Carbon Robotics founder Paul Mikesell. And farmers are increasingly concerned about the long-term health impacts of continually spraying chemicals on their fields.
But not weeding will cost half your crop, killing profitability. Poor food quality is a significant problem. Clearly poor farmer health is as well.
But poor soil health is a potentially existential problem: without the ability to produce food, even a rich, modern, technological society will crash.
What is the solution?
A self-driving farm robot that kills 100,000 weeds an hour by laser.
“We wanted to figure out if there’s a better way we could do this.” Mikesell told me on a recent episode of the TechFirst podcast. “What we discovered relatively early on is that through the use of high-powered energy systems — so, lasers, which is essentially a way of delivering targeted energy — we can kill these weeds and we can do it with the use of our computer vision and deep learning expertise which allows us to in real time identify what’s a weed, what’s a crop and kill the weeds. Get rid of them.”
Research and Evidence
The American Society for Horticultural Science says that evidence points “toward declines of some nutrients in fruits and vegetables available in the United States and the United Kingdom,” and Scientific American says that “crops grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties most of us get today.”
What is the key reason?
Soil depletion
Weeds are getting harder to kill as herbicide-resistant varieties survive, forcing herbicide manufacturers to reformulate ever-more-potent chemicals. That has potential impacts on farmer health — rumours of chemicals like glyphosate contributing to cancer and paraquat leading to Parkinson’s — and it has serious impacts on soil health.
Besides human labour, which is not scalable, herbicides are pretty much the only answer.
Weeding machine features
The weeding machine is a beast at almost 10,000 pounds. It boasts no fewer than eight independently-aimed 150-watt lasers, typically used for metal cutting, that can fire 20 times per second.
They’re guided by 12 high-resolution cameras connected to AI systems that can recognize good crops from bad weeds.
The Laserweeder drives itself with computer vision, finding the furrows in the fields, positioning itself with GPS, and searching for obstacles with LIDAR.
It drives 5 miles/hour and can clear 15-20 acres in a day.
While the machine is self-driving in a field, it’ll require human intervention to move between fields or do anything really complicated, since Carbon Robotics is erring on the side of safety. Farmers can set a geofence with GPS coordinates beyond which the machine won’t travel.
It also works all night long, with high-powered lights that illuminate the crop bed so the cameras can see the plants clearly and the computer systems can identify them.
“It’s very effective,” says Mikesell. “We’ve done this through several seasons now. The farmers are elated and we’ve been able to save them a lot of money on their weed bills.”
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Source: Forbes
