9 ms·
Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides
- XorNot 11y agoThis is the kind of thing where robotics is really exciting. It does an end run around every problem with pesticide use by taking it out of the equation entirely.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- josscrowcroft 11y agoThat's brilliant. What about using a laser to destroy the weeds?
- fchollet 11y agoI suspect this would result in rather superficial weed destruction, since the roots underground would be unharmed and would cause the weed to regrow a few days later. Unrooting the weeds definitely sounds more reliable to me.
- Gravityloss 11y agoOn the other hand, with a laser you could process huge areas at extreme speeds. Think 100 zaps a second.
- ars 11y ago> Think 100 zaps a second. At very low power, not enough power to kill a plant that has lots of water in it.
- Gravityloss 11y agoWhy do you assume low power? :) While you're at it, attach it into a drone. Useful for animal herding and crowd control as well.
- ars 11y ago> Why do you assume low power? :) Because outside of a lab, lasers with enough power to zap and destroy 100 plants per second don't actually exist? (Not that I've done the math, but you really do need a lot of power.)
- jimmar 11y ago> Unrooting the weeds definitely sounds more reliable to me. The robot in the article just pushed the weed underground a few inches. I imagine that some weeds would just pop back after a week, and that the robot would just punch them down again.
- fanquake 11y agoSo you now you have to run your fleet of robot weeders over the field twice? That seems like a waste of time and $ when you could achieve the desired result in a single pass. every extra pass is also more soil compaction.
- prawn 11y agoYou would already need to run the weeder every few days to catch future weeds. Much of it would be about disrupting the weeds while crops get established.
- rcthompson 11y agoPushing the weeds below the surface is probably less disruptive to the surrounding crops than tearing out the roots. And since you have to run the machine constantly anyway to prevent new weeds from establishing themselves, just poking them down repeatedly will eventually starve them of sunlight and kill them, or at least prevent them from ever growing large enough to cause a problem.
- WalterBright 11y agoIf you run the robot every week, burning off the stem & leaves, the plant will eventually starve. Around here, we have an invasive species called scotch broom. If you cut off the plant at ground level, it will grow back. But if you cut it off after it flowers, it'll die. Mowing it flat regularly will also kill it.
- danblick 11y agoThis video of punching the weeds looks promising, but just a thought: maybe you could focus sunlight to burn them? :)
- mparlane 11y agoFire risk?
- Qworg 11y agoThere are several technologies in startups that can kill weeds using custom levels/frequencies of light - it takes about 3 seconds per spot to kill a weed. Lasers, especially fast ones will only handle superficial stuff.
- wycx 11y agoMicrowaves and lasers: http://www.swarmfarm.com/ http://www.swarmfarm.com/
- dsfyu404ed 11y agoCool prototype. ...now make one that mounts on a front 3pt hitch and you might actually sell one. No need for a special robot when a different piece of equipment with its own power source has to go down the field anyway
- fanquake 11y agoWhat do you envision having it mounted on that will drive at the speeds mentioned in the article? It's not like you can throw It on the front of your regular dual wheel or track machine and operate efficiently at those speeds.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y agoGetting rid of weeds will be a continuous task. Farmers don't want to run tractors down rows any more than they have to, nor will they want to run a full sized tractor full-time.
- Havoc 11y agoI don't see it detecting any actual weeds? The detection is just targets and the demonstration of punching the weeds is stationary. Which leaves out the key challenge - distinguishing between weed & crop.
- doctoboggan 11y agoI imagine if the robot is the one who planted the original crops it would know exactly where they should be. Any other growth is defined as a weed.
- claar 11y agoExactly. You don't even need the robot to plant it; crops are planted in rows. Tractors and combines today already track exactly where the plants are planted down to sub-inch accuracy (http://farmindustrynews.com/accurate-inch http://farmindustrynews.com/accurate-inch -- other source, my family farm).
- toyg 11y agoI agree, but to be fair, you could even skip that and just have a remote pilot looking at the rolling video feed and clicking on targets. It still beats having people actually walking under the sun and ruining their backs to pull out weed, or blanketing with herbicide. I'm not so sure punching is a great solution though. Weed is incredibly good at reforming from very very small bits left standing.
- InclinedPlane 11y agobeats ... I hope that was intentional. Seriously though, you're right, even if it requires a human in the loop it's still a huge benefit. Farms could even use remote workers to do the identification.
- Splines 11y agoThis seems like the easiest way to get it working now. In fact, you could do the inverse at some point in the crop cycle - get workers/robots to identify the viable crops, and from that point on stamp everything else remotely plant-like out.
- analog31 11y agoI was amused by "A Bosch Start-Up" on the side of the machine. Now everything is a start-up.
- wpietri 11y agoI was just at the Lean Startup conference, and a lot of the headline speakers were from big companies like GE and Intuit. A large portion of the audience was from names I recognized as well. Being a startup is immensely fashionable. If large companies can figure out how to house innovation, it would solve some major problems that they have. But our current model of management is basically inimical to true innovation, so personally I'm skeptical.
- Terr_ 11y agoYeah, the "start-up" label is subject to cargo-culting.
- n00b101 11y agoLooking at the video, they seem to be using a Microsoft Kinect sensor.
- jqm 11y agoThis is cool but I have to disagree with this phrase from the article.... "Given the scale of farming today, treating weeds chemically is really the only practical way for humans to keep them under control". It's the easiest way to keep weeds under control but not the only practical way. (Source: I worked for the weed science department (yes, they had one at my school) while at university.) Here are some other methods for reducing weeds: 1) Before planting, till and water the field causing weeds to germinate. Then harrow the field killing all the weeds. Do this multiple times if needed. 2) Good old fashioned cultivation as was done before the herbicide period. (The article on the robot was posted a few days ago and in response I posted the below... it has a lot of pictured of weed control devices which may be interesting to someone working on robotic weed control....https://archive.org/stream/SteelInTheField/Steel%20in%20the%20Field#page/n0/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/SteelInTheField/Steel%20in%20the%...) 3) Crop spacing. Space crops so they out-compete the weeds (this is already usually done). 4) Keep fields clean. Keep the ditch-rows clean. Don't let weeds go to seed. After a period of time the bank of weed seeds in the soil is reduced and there are less weeds to control I know herbicides are faster and cheaper (if we don't consider externalized costs). But they aren't the only "practical" way to eliminate weeds. It does take good management and more effort to eliminate or reduce herbicide use though. I personally think it's very worth it. Oh, and I'm excited about robotics. I don't know about this device, but I do think field robotics is the future.
- jqm 11y agoThere is another approach to weed control. Don't do anything. Let weeds come up if they want to. I remember a crusty old guy in Florida showing me his watermelon field that was full of weeds. I said something about it and he said the weeds actually shaded the watermelons keeping them from sunburning and he had no intention of removing them. I don't know if this is necessarily true or if he just didn't feel like doing anything about it but apparently he didn't think the weeds were causing economic harm and there were a lot of watermelons in spite of the weeds.
- arjie 11y agoFunny. Masanobu Fukuoka in One Straw Revolution argues for a similar approach in orchard maintenance, if I recall correctly: allowing all sorts of plants to grow below the trees and provide ground cover.
- discreteevent 11y agoThe architecture of the ROS system is worth looking at if you haven't seen it. Everything has a URL and processes communicate using YAML messages by publishing or osubscribing to topics. (Its very simple but a bit more liberating than REST!) http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingNodes http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingNodes http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingTopics http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingTopics http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingServicesParams http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingServicesParam...
- Qworg 11y agoROS is being rewritten right now - 2.0 alpha is out. http://design.ros2.org http://design.ros2.org https://github.com/ros2/ros2 https://github.com/ros2/ros2
- aaron695 11y agoIt's a good example of how play in the future will also go the way of jobs. Why garden when your neighbors will have amazing gardens cheaply designed and looked after by robots. And it'll be smart, it'll know exactly how many weeds to leave so it doesn't look to perfect, exactly when to plant and pollinate, order things online when needed.
- icelancer 11y agoThe journey is as much fun as the end product. Usually moreso in these cases.
- aaron695 11y agoThis is the problem, robots are killing the journey. To take your point literally Like jobs, at first it's great, highways, planes, easy to access information open up the world to everyone. But it'll get to the stage where it's too easy. Adventures are getting harder to have. You no longer find that amazing restaurants, you yelp them and book months in advance. In the future when you're chatting to someone about visiting county X and you realise they have only been there virtually it'll perhaps devalue your own journey, then perhaps you'll get what I mean.
- Dylan16807 11y agoYou know people still walk right?
- InclinedPlane 11y agoPeople tend to get play and competition mixed up, with disastrous consequences. Do what you enjoy doing, don't worry if it's better than anyone else.
- visarga 11y agoBesides gardening, robots could clean up garbage. An army of small bots could clean up a forest in no time (or go underwater to clean up the shores).
- barney54 11y agoHow many years until a robot like this will cut your grass, weed the lawn, and weed your flowerbeds?
- kbenson 11y agoHow many years until we be stuck with this archaic and elitist concept of a lawn? Grass where it serves some benefit such as a backyard at least serves a purpose. Front lawns in locations where they are ornamental are a blight.
- whoiskevin 11y agoFor as long as I live where a lawn does not require a sprinkler. Think outside the box.
- kbenson 11y agoSo we are all stuck with an outdated concept that originated from aristocratic landowners who wanted to show how much money they had by devoting a portion of their estate to not growing crops and just being manicured because you can do it without watering? How very kind of you to epitomize the "get off my lawn" meme, but I'm not on your lawn. I'm not telling you to get rid of your lawn, but the concept as it exists now and it's popularization is at best wasteful, and in some cases actively causes problems with water availability in some areas. Some reform in the popularized concept of a front lawn would be beneficial to everyone.
- spdionis 11y agoLawns look nice. Sounds like a good enough reason to keep them. We are not THAT overpopulated.
- brc 11y agoThey also stop erosion, provide habitat for insects and animals and are pleasing to walk on. I get having a lawn in a desert is a poor use of water, but for many houses and recreational areas, it's an excellent way to cover ground.
- aidos 11y agoI have countless weeks / months experience in dealing with manual weed removal. At times when I was younger I spent 14+ hours a day out in the field destroying weeds with a hand hoe. One of the main crops I was doing it for was squash. The squash plant is pretty broad and the hand hoe allowed you to get close in under the plant. That's something this technique couldn't handle. As someone working on minimum wage, I could get through a pretty large area in a day. Sometimes there would half a dozen of us in a gang. I'm not sure how much a device like this would eventually cost but I suspect for the same money you could buy a lot of minimum wage manual labour. Either way, cool prototype!
- fanquake 11y agoThere's a research project being done on the viability of hand picking radish plants out of wheat and lupin crops on broadacre farms here in Western Australia. Some farmers already do it, but once the results come out, I'm wondering home many more will start.
- stretchwithme 11y agoI think eventually farming will be completely robotic and we'll have farm on our roofs. Household waste will be processed and used for it. Robots will harvest crops for us and even get them to market if we aren't around to eat them, probably selling to people in the neighborhood.
- jhallenworld 11y agoParts of my family are in the bedding plant / greenhouse business. One cool technology is the transplanting machine. This transfers seedlings from "plug trays" to "flats" and replaces an assembly line of ladies doing this work. Here is one design: http://www.hamilton-design.co.uk/transplanter.html http://www.hamilton-design.co.uk/transplanter.html The ones they actually used were the "Harrison Transplanter".. could not find a video, but here is one http://bid.sheridanauctionservice.com/images/lot/3471/3471937_0.jpg?1439472444 http://bid.sheridanauctionservice.com/images/lot/3471/347193... Harrison is neighbor of ours who worked at Brookhaven National Labs but then became an entrepreneur. He sold a bunch of them.
- zo1 11y agoSo, HN, this looks like really fun and interesting stuff to work on. Any ideas on how a normal developer with a CS background can get into something like this? Either working for this company, or one like it... Or hobby projects that are within a normal person's budget. Let me know if I should elaborate further and make an Ask HN out of this?
- bglazer 11y agoNo idea how to get into this on the company side. Apparently hey use Robotics Operating System (ROS) quite extensively, so you could learn about that (http://www.ros.org/ http://www.ros.org/) On the hobby side, check out farmbot http://farmbot.io/ http://farmbot.io/