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Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

• nloa 5y ago
  I hate how the website won't let me go back in my browser history as it just reloads the page.
• tda 5y ago
  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
• retro64 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26412624
  • the_mitsuhiko 5y ago
    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.
• ricksunny 5y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25749015
• ceejayoz 5y ago
  It's all fun and games until the selection pressure evolves weeds that say "human" on their leaves to fool the AI.
  • visarga 5y ago
    Are you thinking of the CLIP adversarial attack where they wrote "iPhone" on a potato?
  • skapadia 5y ago
    Or evolves the weeds to grow their own lasers.
    • anthk 5y ago
      Just a shinning/mirrory-silvery leaf.
  • yetihehe 5y ago
    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 https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Counting_pines
  • JKCalhoun 5y ago
    I stopped reading at "Farming robot kills 100k" and ran to my prepper basement.
  • piyh 5y ago
    Farming goes from broad selection against pests with chemicals to introducing a massive selection pressure towards biological mimicry and adversarial image attacks.
    • jerf 5y ago
      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.
• frankzander 5y ago
  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.
  • Cd00d 5y ago
    I think you're ignoring non-native species that can overwhelm an ecosystem. There's no going with nature with those "weeds".
  • jgwil2 5y ago
    Surely there will always be wild plants (weeds) that compete with cultivated plants for sunlight, no?
    • frankzander 5y ago
      if you mange the cover weeds than they compete with the unwanted weeds.
  • ashtonbaker 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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_Grazing_Animals_as_Weed_Control_Agents https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236942635_Grazing_A... [2] https://web-japan.org/trends01/article/021022sci_r.html https://web-japan.org/trends01/article/021022sci_r.html [3] https://eorganic.org/node/2535 https://eorganic.org/node/2535
• MattRix 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    That's not a problem for the people selling the robot.
    • adwn 5y ago
      > 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 5y ago
    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.
• le-mark 5y ago
  Ah man, someone actually built my weed zapper with “weed/not weed” AI! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ACmydtFDTGs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ACmydtFDTGs
  • black_puppydog 5y ago
    > The uploader has not made this video available in your country.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        There's a really good writeup of how the app in the show was created: https://medium.com/@timanglade/how-hbos-silicon-valley-built-not-hotdog-with-mobile-tensorflow-keras-react-native-ef03260747f3 https://medium.com/@timanglade/how-hbos-silicon-valley-built...
• karlkloss 5y ago
  Better smoke that weed.
• eof 5y ago
  Someone please make one that does mosquitoes
  • yetihehe 5y ago
    Done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26376376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26376376
    • kuroguro 5y ago
      MS & Intellectual Ventures (2010) https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_zap_malaria https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_z... Satisfying slowmo killshots near end :)
      • BitwiseFool 5y ago
        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 5y ago
          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 5y ago
            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.
• cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  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.
  • ransom1538 5y ago
    "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 5y ago
      Hell, you could probably stick a fuel tank and a generator on it if you had to.
      • meepmorp 5y ago
        Which is basically what they did; upthread, someone links to the specs and they have an onboard Cummins diesel generator.
      • toss1 5y ago
        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 https://carbonrobotics.com/features
    • garrettgrimsley 5y ago
      You’d be dragging that wire over your rows of crops, potentially damaging them.
• ape4 5y ago
  It will be the norm on Mars
  • mrits 5y ago
    finally, we can solve the Mars weed problem
• boringg 5y ago
  Roomba for farming.
• DrOctagon 5y ago
  And it only fires the laser once. The fire that starts does the rest.
• oconnor663 5y ago
  > robot kills 100k It was only a matter of time. A doom of our own making.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• joosters 5y ago
  "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.
  • klohto 5y ago
    It’s not a tech industry ffs. The agriculture is already operating on a thin margin.
  • f6v 5y ago
    Raise the wages -> food prices rise. Rinse and repeat.
    • danbruc 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
          Agriculture is incredibly subsidized, which means cost of production and cost at point of sale do not have a tight relationship
        • erikpukinskis 5y ago
          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.
• roamerz 5y ago
  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.
• underseacables 5y ago
  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.
  • te_chris 5y ago
    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-demographic-reversal-and-what-it-means-for-the-economy/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-...
  • jillesvangurp 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      The current way is to spray a broadbase weed killer. From a decent sized tractor, usually with some sort of GPS guided map.
  • hondo77 5y ago
    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.
  • imtringued 5y ago
    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.
• ermik 5y ago
  I'm not a weed, noooooo...
• motohagiography 5y ago
  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.
  • loonster 5y ago
    Microwave powered drones. Have a mothership or tower track and send energy to the drones.
  • swiley 5y ago
    Commodity drown with high powered laser for killing things based on image recognition sounds like sci-fi dystopia.
    • ourmandave 5y ago
      All roads lead to Skynet, some less obvious than others.
    • dkarl 5y ago
      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.
• damsta 5y ago
  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.
• lefstathiou 5y ago
  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.
• kolbe 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Oh, don't worry. This is way behind AI weaponry tech. Err... that's probably not what you wanted to hear, though.
    • kolbe 5y ago
      You say that, but I've seen plenty of modern war videos where US soldiers are pointing/shooting weapons manually and locating enemies only by seeing them with their eyes.
• sldksk 5y ago
  “Labor shortages” is a mythical term for wage shortages.
• smachiz 5y ago
  I need to borrow this for 1 hour.
• karol 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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.
  • imtringued 5y ago
    There are worse things that you can do to the soil, things like tilling it.
  • contingencies 5y ago
    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).
• mavu 5y ago
  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?
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-resources/popular-topics/brazilian-rubber-plantations/ 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_beetle
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    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.
• JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  I love that this reminds me of the floating gardening robots in Fallout 4, tending the plants even after humans were gone.
• f6v 5y ago
  Anyone who has pulled weeds in their life knows it’s incredibly hard labour. We should automate agriculture as much as possible.
• kordlessagain 5y ago
  Having battled weeds in a previous lifetime I can tell you those weeds are far from dead.
  • jerf 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    [deleted]
• mythrwy 5y ago
  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?
• jonplackett 5y ago
  I really like the idea that a massive robot can be certified Organic.
• 1970-01-01 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Just buy or rent a goat. Those things love poison ivy.
    • Balgair 5y ago
      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?
      • ed25519FUUU 5y ago
        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 5y ago
          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.
• stretchwithme 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    It's difficult to prove you wrong. It takes forever to do so.
    • stretchwithme 5y ago
      Nature demonstrates that very small machines are possible. We just haven't learned how to build them yet.
• Hitton 5y ago
  Laser hair removal meets farming.
• OnlyOneCannolo 5y ago
  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?
  • klausjensen 5y ago
    Labor is expensive in many countries. :)
    • OnlyOneCannolo 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
  • ninju 5y ago
    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
• jbverschoor 5y ago
  The next step will hopefully be something on a rail, as I don't apreciate diesel either :-)
• jarmitage 5y ago
  Are there scenarios where this would be more efficient than using regenerative agriculture techniques like cover cropping to naturally out-compete weeds?
  • ed25519FUUU 5y ago
    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.
• OliverJones 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
• fortran77 5y ago
  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.
• gdubs 5y ago
  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?
  • pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
    Had the same thought, also totally agree. Looking forward to seeing more advancements in this field. Pun intended.
  • evanlivingston 5y ago
    Is there a reason you need to mow your slope?
    • gdubs 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
        • gdubs 5y ago
          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.
        • 5y ago
• jpollock 5y ago
  It looks like almost 50% of the plot is taken up by wheel rut? Is that typical?
  • contingencies 5y ago
    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!
  • djrogers 5y ago
    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.
• mrwaffle 5y ago
  sub /weeds/humans/
• dalbasal 5y ago
  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.
• ElectricMind 5y ago
  Wait till someone pushes “hypocrite commits” replacing string "weeds" with "humans". Booyah :)
• moron4hire 5y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP7GoNKcTS4
• throwawayboise 5y ago
  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?
  • latch 5y ago
    slower?
  • erikpukinskis 5y ago
    Generally solid state decides are cheaper to maintain.
    • throwawayboise 5y ago
      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.
  • myself248 5y ago
    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.
• noxer 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    I have a feeling that this robot would allow to care for multiple plants growing in symbiosis
    • noxer 5y ago
      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.
• varispeed 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
• naruvimama 5y ago
  How about fires? This seems to be a risk with the use of high power lasers, meant to burn the weeds.
• at_a_remove 5y ago
  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?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• anotheryou 5y ago
  Funny how the field is all dead.
• throwawayboise 5y ago
  Autonomous robots armed with powerful infrared lasers -- what could go wrong?
• Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  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?
• hosh 5y ago
  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-forest-gardens-were-deliberately-planted-indigenous-people https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/pacific-northwest-s-...
  • jonas21 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 ;-)
• v8xi 5y ago
  Great news until we get laser-resistant weeds. God help us
  • oneepic 5y ago
    Or weeds that grow laser cannons to fight back. Might be a great alternative to traditional home security systems.
• aurizon 5y ago
  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.
• fractal618 5y ago
  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.
  • maelito 5y ago
    Paying workers more is difficult when the price of food is supposed to go or stay down.
    • giantrobot 5y ago
      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 5y ago
    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.
  • kickout 5y ago
    Pesticides highly unlikely, herbicides maybe.
• etxm 5y ago
  Have the robots answered the age old philosophical question: What is a weed?
• efitz 5y ago
  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?
• anticristi 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
• SubiculumCode 5y ago
  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?
• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  Is it just me or did anyone else replace 'weed' with 'anti-government protestor'?
• one_off_comment 5y ago
  Can we talk about the industrial design of this thing for a moment? It looks like something out of Simon Stålenhag. I don't know whether to be excited or terrified.
  • detaro 5y ago
    I think that's more a sign that Stålenhag has a good eye for practical industrial design.
• ryanmarsh 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    A mechanical instrument would have to be a lot more clever than a laser to destroy the weed without messing with the wanted plants.
• gvb 5y ago
  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 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/Carbon-Robotics-Disrupts-Farming-Industry-with-Autonomous-Weeders 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 5y ago
    Not to mention the robot looks like a 3D rendering...
• vkou 5y ago
  How does it compete with organic farming robots that are paid ~$4-6/hour to kill weeds?
• Animats 5y ago
  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-of-robotic-weeders https://www.agriculture.com/technology/robotics/the-future-o...
• kickout 5y ago
  Good timing https://thinkingagriculture.io/the-agriculture-unicorn-hiding-in-plain-sight/ https://thinkingagriculture.io/the-agriculture-unicorn-hidin...
• fridif 5y ago
  Good.
• colechristensen 5y ago
  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.
• mulmen 5y ago
  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.
• slumdev 5y ago
  Anything that reduces the amount of Roundup that gets sprayed into the environment...
• zython 5y ago
  I wonder if there are any (food) safety concerns blasting high powered lazers at living tissue.
• regularemployee 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    They use resources that other plants need. They can also smother other plants since weeds are fast growing.
• daemonk 5y ago
  I wonder if this will put selective pressure on weeds to evolve to look like crops.
  • whoomp12342 5y ago
    or to look like mirrors
• andrewstuart 5y ago
  When will killing things no longer be a virtue?
• 99_00 5y ago
  I'd settle for a manually operated laser to zap weeds.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  I bet it could also be tuned to zap destructive insects without need for pesticides.
• pm2222 5y ago
  One for my lawn please.
• spsful 5y ago
  I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned it yet, but I don't see it in the thread anywhere. Have they mentioned its safety around animals? Presumably a neural network would identify most mammals properly, but what about an insect? Could a praying mantis be lumped in as a weed?
• Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  oh, by the way, we have some really horrible invasive species that need eradicating as well. . .
• hondadriver 5y ago
  Horizon Zero Dawn starts here...
• Melting_Harps 5y ago
  This is amazing, and I'm glad we're now starting to see the benefits of these startups and companies come to Ag. I was in my last year of apprenticeship in Switzerland when New Holland was testing their autopilot planting system, something John Deere had already deployed, and it pretty much had to be corrected every few meteres. But the overall sentiment was that this tech is great, but is still a long way from becoming a reality. Having been in tech and from CA I knew that was partly true but that you cannot dismiss the rate of progress if bright minds and resources are coupled with determined and skilled workers. I had access to one of those John Deere, it had a realtively comfortable cabin with a radio and seat warmers etc... but after seeing the sticker shock (500k CHF) I saw how they were closed sourced and had to be serviced by appointment only--the brother in law owned the nearby JD dealership in town. I never bothered to use them more than one or twice when the older manual tranmission and for more spartan Renault, Masey-Fugerson, Case, Fiat tractors weren't available or had to haul much larger cargo (100s of tons of potatos to the fulfillment depot, or take 20 cows out of pasture into the barn under 15 mins) due to snow storms. With that said, this has unit has seemingly limited applications: as you can see this was done in the early phases of growth (looks like very early germination/sprouting) and while you can do this in later stages for things like greens and possibly tubers and other lower growth crops with spaces in between this won't work for things that like grains and corn which are much taller, more densely sowed and have thicker canopies and are what accounts of the most mono-crop and pesticide use outside of cotton. It's amazing, and I hope we see more of this instead of smart phone 'innovation' but this is why I think rather than shoot for full autonomy in Ag we should just have equipment that can focus on the more menial and labor intesive things like weeding, planting, harvesting because the farmer will always need to be on sight for things like pH test, irrigation, nutrient fluctuations, changes in weather (hail, frost) etc... And have the farm manager be paid well, like 70K+ and that they get trained from an early stage in their careers to rely and use this kind of technology wherever possible and have direct feedback with technologists to direct them to other uses. I advocated for this as much as I did for sustainability and renewable Ag when I was farming, and it was looked down on in the Biodyanmic community that relies on lots of 'woo' to mask that it's a back breaking, manual labor intensive job that is necessary to create a superior product and justify the +30% mark up in price. This alone would free up so much more Human capital and allow one to do more of their time that can help sustain the business and help in creating auxiliary business models to support the core instead of focusing on weeding and lower yields due drops is soil fertility due to overuse of fertilizers and pesticides and a direct result due to lack of labor, which other than the ongoing water crisis, and climate change is the biggest issue for farmers in the Western/developed World.
• elihu 5y ago
  Looks like a very useful machine. It seems awfully bulky, but then the CO2 tubes used in 150 watt lasers are probably around six feet long, so that kind of sets a minimum size for the machine. A 74 horsepower generator sounds like overkill, though. I suppose they probably use galvanometers for aiming the laser? Galvos are very fast but they tend not to be terribly accurate. This device isn't for precision machining so it's probably good enough. I'd also expect the vibration and jostling of the machine to be a problem, but maybe it stops momentarily whenever it does a laser sweep. I'd think that they really ought to have some kind of shroud draped around it during regular operation to prevent eye damage if someone is too close (especially if there's a risk of shiny metal objects lying on the ground). CO2 laser light is invisible; generally, you just see a white flash when it burns things because that's the light given off by the heated material. There'd also be an obvious fire hazard, though in practice a well-focused high power beam can often just vaporize a thing before it catches on fire. Cutting paper and cardboard in a laser cutter is usually fine; it's wood that tends to burn. (Especially oily wood.) At any rate they'd probably be restricted to using the machine when fire risk is low. I wonder how well it copes with weeds that are growing right next to desirable plants? As the crop plants get bigger, it must get harder to get the right angle to burn the weed without hitting the plant. I also wonder how effective it is at actually killing weeds. Maybe if it can get them when they're small, it can linger the laser over the site of the weed long enough to cook the root. I'm hoping this sort of thing catches on and becomes more advanced. Near where I live we have a huge park that's being overtaken by English ivy. It's very hilly and forested, so any ivy-killing robot would probably have to be something like a hexapod, and lasers are kind of questionable in a forest setting except maybe on wet days.