16 ms·
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 plumm
by motohagiography 6y 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 6y agoMicrowave powered drones. Have a mothership or tower track and send energy to the drones.
- swiley 6y agoCommodity drown with high powered laser for killing things based on image recognition sounds like sci-fi dystopia.
- ourmandave 6y agoAll roads lead to Skynet, some less obvious than others.
- dkarl 6y agoYeah, 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.
- dash2 6y agoDon't worry. The robots can use machine guns like the rest of us.
- stevespang 6y agoBill Gates was already involved in a startup to radar identify and kill mosquitos with lasers . . . guess it did not go well.
- joshuaissac 6y agoIt resulted in a prototype that apparently cost $50 per unit, but no retail product yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser
- atat7024 6y agoAre there massive amounts of retail products in, say, Africa?
- joshuaissac 6y agoYes, Africa's retail market was worth US$1.4tn in 2015.[1] 1. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/africas-consumer-market-potential.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/africas...
- shantara 6y agoUnfortunately, you don't need that much power to permanently blind a human.
- Pokepokalypse 6y agofor that matter; microwaves cook us from the inside out at 100+ meters, and don't require very good aim.
- martin_a 6y agoJust don't step on the field and you won't be mistaken for a rat and be zapped.
- DennisP 6y agoTrue, but it seems less dystopian than soaking vast fields with millions of pounds of neurotoxins, like we do today.
- linuxftw 6y agoThose 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.
- burnished 6y agoHey, 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 6y agoI'm not concerned about the needle, only what's coming through it, approved by an entirely captured regulatory body.
- Pokepokalypse 6y agocan't be any worse than what's potentially in your hamburger.
- sushid 6y agoThen you drink a cup of glyphosate. Even folks on payroll spewing that nonsense would never entertain the thought of actually going through with it.
- bigbizisverywyz 6y agoThere is a video on youtube of a Monsanto lobbyist being challenged to do exactly that, quite funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM
- protomyth 6y agoI 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.
- piyh 6y agoDrones 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.
- esrh 6y agoTo me that message implied weed recognition and marking with drones followed by destruction with the cube.
- hu3 6y agoThat'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.
- birdman3131 6y agoNo 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.
- abakker 6y agoRTK GPS has +/- 3cm Lat/long precision. That gets you very close, and then with a confirming camera, you could aim and fire.
- sgtnoodle 6y agoUnless 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.
- le-mark 6y agoIt 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 6y agoA real world useful variant of Not Hotdog. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14636228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14636228
- CoastalCoder 6y agoThat was my first thought as well. My second thought was, "Please nobody invent a drone that shoots lasers at 'not hotdog'".
- gbasin 6y agoHot dog, no hot dog?
- SubiculumCode 6y agoI wonder why it can't it be done via location? Where we planted, vs where we did not plant.
- shepting 6y agoThis 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 6y ago
- anonuser123456 6y ago>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 6y agoNon-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...
- MayeulC 6y agoI 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#Agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspectral_imaging#Agricult... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multispectral_image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multispectral_image [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-spectrum_photography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-spectrum_photography
- throwaway09223 6y ago> Also, isn't this a fire hazard? Unlikely. Heating a plant to kill it is considerably lower power than heating a plant to combust it and turn it to ash. It would also be trivial to add a water sprayer as part of the process.
- riskable 6y ago> 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.
- Balgair 6y ago> 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 6y agoI 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 6y agoPerhaps he just meant IR sensors? Also, I wonder whether UV sensors would be helpful.
- MengerSponge 6y agoI 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 6y agoDon'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 6y agoI 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.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoI 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 6y agoI wondered about the corollary - at what point does selective pressure create a weed that's indistinguishable from a crop?
- marcus_holmes 6y agowell, same, do we have weeds that have evolved resistance to roundup?
- intergalplan 6y agoI 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.
- JUNGLEISMASSIVE 6y agoWhether 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.
- hourislate 6y agoOpen 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.
- propertymagnate 6y agoSounds a lot safer to whitelist what can be zapped rather then blacklist what can't, no? I mean, this is a moving autonomous laser platform we're talking about.
- RHSeeger 6y agoMy 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.
- exabrial 6y agoActually, 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.
- ajarmst 6y agoI'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 6y agoWhy do your weeds have 2 eyes, a nose, and a mouth in all of the training libraries?
- WalterBright 6y agoI'd like a lawnmower sized one for my yard!
- cogman10 6y agoMy prediction, this thing will be built into pivots. Most farms irrigate with a giant automated system that sweeps around the field in regular intervals. These weed death lasers could be integrated to the base of the system and ran from the same power that moves the pivot. Since these things don't move all that fast, you could have a central track and move the killer box up and down the line.
- Pokepokalypse 6y agoyes, this seems like a natural progression.
- filoeleven 6y agoIt wouldn’t even have to burn all the weeds on the first pass. It’s like the herbicidal equivalent of mark-and-sweep garbage collection.