12 ms·
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
by piyh 6y ago
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.
- 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.
- Igelau 6y agoAh, the classic "Death Cube and Tracker Drone" design pattern. DCTD for short.
- pkdpic_y9k 6y agoGood point, but you havent thought of the *millions of tiny mirrors* they'd obviously be using :)
- nemo44x 6y agoWhat 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.
- riskable 6y agoIt 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 6y agoYes 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 6y agoWire 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 6y agoNo, wire gantry would be very much ok for this solution. You don't need wires to be that rigid for that.
- Arrath 6y agoI 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 6y ago>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.
- kickout 6y agoOk 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
- IanCal 6y agoThat 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.
- flukus 6y ago> That does depend on how much area it can cover per day. This assumes weeding is a time sensitive task, which I find very doubtful. Realistically covering your land area in a week is probably enough, but maybe that's much higher.
- slt2021 6y agoagricultural drones run on gasoline and have plenty of energy
- Pokepokalypse 6y agogasoline? I'm thinking ethanol derived from fermentation of the parts of the plant that were not shipped to market.
- slt2021 6y agoyeah could be that as well, definitely some conventional ICE engines, not batteries
- eloff 6y agoDrones 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 6y agoIf 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.
- visarga 6y ago> If they were able to make drones work Yes, let's put powerful lasers on drones flown by AI. What could happen? I just hope the human recognition model doesn't shoot more of one race than another.
- Arnavion 6y ago>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 6y agoYou think drones are going to harvest food?
- red75prime 6y ago> zap any non-native invasive species it sees Given the climate change it could be the other way around. Zap some native saplings, which can no longer thrive.
- bri3d 6y ago
- justicezyx 6y agoDJI has some demonstration of target pesticide spreading drone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfdWYztSqUI 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.
- kickout 6y agoDrones 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 6y agoMaybe very small drones with mirrors and cameras and a ground-based robotic tank with a laser cannon.
- ping_pong 6y agoThis is an incredibly great idea.
- jadbox 6y agoI 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.
- a1369209993 6y agoPretty sure they're explicitly suggesting indirect fire, actually. Base station fires at mirror, and drone uses mirror to reflect laser to target. There might be stability problems, angle-at-which-it-hits-the-weed problems, and more-laser-scattering-due-to-longer-beam-path problems, but line of sight itself should be fine since the drone is up in the air.
- hawski 6y agoIndeed a good idea, but I would only hope it would have a reliable fail-safe, becaue it would be a little reverse GoldenEye.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- m463 6y agoOr it could just fly upside down. maybe add wheels to set cutting height :)
- dylan604 6y ago
- silasb 6y agoTethered drones might work.
- samatman 6y agoCompletely 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.
- piyh 6y agoIt's not just the robot though, it's the millions or tens of millions of dollars of wheeled or tracked equipment he already has.
- mparlane 6y agoStill easier to harvest if you have the rows though.
- Pokepokalypse 6y agoIMO; I think setting up lightweight aluminum rails, and run a framework of multi-purpose bots along that. Since the technology is getting lighter and lighter, it seems you could even do this and use LESS material than these gargantuan tractor/harvester/combine units. It may not even be necessary to plough fields anymore, when a smaller automated unit could just operate on the least amount of soil necessary for the plant to thrive. Also: no more chemical weed killers. Do this with bugs, and get rid of insecticides as well.
- stubish 6y agoWhen they can scale this down for home use, I think the market will want legs. A miniature Imperial Walker ambling around your garden zapping weeds would sell.