8 ms·

Manual weed/insect control is one of the areas I’m really hoping will be a principal benefit of AI and robotics. Imagine replacing a large portion of the chemic

by qzw 3y ago

Manual weed/insect control is one of the areas I’m really hoping will be a principal benefit of AI and robotics. Imagine replacing a large portion of the chemicals currently used in agriculture with physical means of elimination. That would get rid of a huge source of environmental and ecological damage.

amarcheschi 3y ago
There are some softwares to recognize and track insects given a video feed, I had to search them for a course in uni involving agritech, eg https://github.com/kimbjerge/insectTracking https://github.com/kimbjerge/insectTracking There are paid SaaS as well Ninja edit I find agritech in its entirety very interesting, you have startups like constellr that aim to provide insights on your crops with satellite data, and public projects like copernicus that give you access for free to satellitar data of the whole world - and a new scan is done every 5 days -, although satellite resolution still doesn't go under 10/20m I think
jxf 3y ago
Harvesting is also a good use case; many crops cannot be harvested in any reliable way besides by hand.
- bumby 3y ago
  Saffron comes to mind. It's my understanding that the price is crazy high simply because it's delicate work that has to be done by hand
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
In glass houses it’s already possible to solve most issues without chemicals, but still happens often. Farmers in general are very risk averse. Flower fields are terrible chemical wise, much worse then food due to less strict rules
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
berkes 3y ago
Knowing agriculture a little, it's not going to be "replaced by" but rather "in addition to". These tulip farms will continue to use as much pesticides and herbicides as before regardless of mechanical pest controls. It's just too cheap to use chemicals, and the risk for not using it too big. A local farmer told me that if they don't use herbicides on timed basis (so even if the farmer can see there's no weeds with his eyes and experience) their insurances would go up so much that they could pay twice the amount of chemicals for that insurance rate rise.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Seems like there is gonna be opportunity for another insurance company to compete by understanding new technology and offer new policies that acknowledge that.
  - berkes 3y ago
    If that were the case, there would have been insurance companies that understood statistics and deep, local and domain- knowledge of farmers on what is needed to mitigate or predict risks. I'm quite sure insurance companies know this extremely well. But either choose to stay on the safe side because of extreme risk aversion and quite certainly because of monopolies or vendor-lock-in.
    - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
      >there would have been insurance companies that understood statistics and deep, local and domain- knowledge Sounds like a perfect job for an AI-actuary-based insurance company.
- taneq 3y ago
  > These tulip farms will continue to use as much pesticides and herbicides as before regardless of mechanical pest controls. Not if robots are cheaper than the poisons. Your point about insurance is interesting, the industry would do a massive backflip on pesticides if some robotics company managed to convince insurance companies that using their product was less risky than chemical means.
jetrink 3y ago
A hybrid approach would work well too in some situations. When I worked in wetland restoration, one thing we did to reduce the ecological impact of herbicides was to cut the weeds a few inches above the water or soil, and then to paint herbicide directly on the cut face with a foam brush. This was a lot more labor intensive than spraying, but reduced the amount of herbicide used by 80-90%, and prevented any from landing in the water via over-spray. Even without the cutting step, applying herbicide directly to the weeds with a brush would be a big improvement over spraying.
rob74 3y ago
Yes - this is exactly what AI/robotics should be targeted at - things that currently would have to be done manually, but aren't feasible (at least not in high-wage countries) like this one, or sorting mixed trash into non-recyclable and recyclable (and further into various metals and plastics) etc. Instead, it's targeted at replacing graphics artists and software developers...
- bumby 3y ago
  Why not both? Manual work has been getting automated away for over a century. Tech has already eroded low and middle class jobs for decades. To think that similar won't happen in knowledge work (or that we shouldn't let it), feels like a very techy type of NIMBYism
  - bigfudge 3y ago
    Because one will be a net benefit to society and the other probably won’t be?
    - bumby 3y ago
      Can you elaborate? Because it's not immediately clear to me the distinction. I'll concede that automating manual labor has made consumer products cheaper. Whether that is wholly a net benefit, I think, is up for debate. When you consider the externalities like the environmental effects of rampant consumerism and the erosion of the middle class via a reduction in manufacturing jobs, I think there's plenty of basis for at least arguing there is tipping point on automating away manual labor. To say automating manual labor bluntly (and without careful consideration of blowback) always leads to a better society, I think one needs to define what they mean as society and what metrics they're using to define "better." I, personally, don't think raw GDP is a good measure of the health of a society. If anything, I think automating knowledge work has as at least a potentially larger upside. The downside will largely be borne by the upper-middle and upper-classes, which is why the GGP can read like a classist perspective.
      - 3y ago
lossolo 3y ago
Check out this one "Sniper robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV0cR_Nhac0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV0cR_Nhac0
- scns 3y ago
  Fantastic! Thank you.
bumby 3y ago
I agree, there is a lot of delicate and manual agricultural work that I would like see AI tackle. But this doesn't seem to be one of them. The article is a little light on the details, but it doesn't look like this robut does any manual work on the flowers. Rather, it seems like it uses image recognition to plot the GPS coordinates of potential sick plants (with the assumption that a human will follow up to remove them manually if necessary).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kjkjadksj 3y ago
At the end of the day its still cheaper to spray pesticide so thats what the farmer will do, unless regulated.
- rurban 3y ago
  For sure not. Visual AI is taking over now (because it scales easily), robots already did so.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    What is cheaper, a robot that has a vision program to identify pests and target them alone, or a robot that just has to spray pesticide?
    - rurban 3y ago
      Vision by far, a lot more zeros for a robot. Pest control targetting is still done manually, unless you buy this expensive robot. But harvesting robots are already used in the field, and real-time vision helps there.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
barbazoo 3y ago
Totally, depends on what's cheaper though as that's what farmers will choose, no matter what stage of the climate crisis we're in.
- randomdata 3y ago
  Speaking as a farmer – the farmer will always choose what the consumer wants. Any deviation from that and you won't be farming for long. Granted, what's cheapest is usually what the consumer wants.
DesiLurker 3y ago
"all I want is my frickin lasers attached to my frickin weedbot"

by qzw 3y ago

amarcheschi 3y ago

There are some softwares to recognize and track insects given a video feed, I had to search them for a course in uni involving agritech, eg https://github.com/kimbjerge/insectTracking https://github.com/kimbjerge/insectTracking There are paid SaaS as well Ninja edit I find agritech in its entirety very interesting, you have startups like constellr that aim to provide insights on your crops with satellite data, and public projects like copernicus that give you access for free to satellitar data of the whole world - and a new scan is done every 5 days -, although satellite resolution still doesn't go under 10/20m I think

jxf 3y ago

Harvesting is also a good use case; many crops cannot be harvested in any reliable way besides by hand.

bumby 3y ago
Saffron comes to mind. It's my understanding that the price is crazy high simply because it's delicate work that has to be done by hand

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

In glass houses it’s already possible to solve most issues without chemicals, but still happens often. Farmers in general are very risk averse. Flower fields are terrible chemical wise, much worse then food due to less strict rules

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

berkes 3y ago

Knowing agriculture a little, it's not going to be "replaced by" but rather "in addition to". These tulip farms will continue to use as much pesticides and herbicides as before regardless of mechanical pest controls. It's just too cheap to use chemicals, and the risk for not using it too big. A local farmer told me that if they don't use herbicides on timed basis (so even if the farmer can see there's no weeds with his eyes and experience) their insurances would go up so much that they could pay twice the amount of chemicals for that insurance rate rise.

ajmurmann 3y ago
Seems like there is gonna be opportunity for another insurance company to compete by understanding new technology and offer new policies that acknowledge that.
- berkes 3y ago
  If that were the case, there would have been insurance companies that understood statistics and deep, local and domain- knowledge of farmers on what is needed to mitigate or predict risks. I'm quite sure insurance companies know this extremely well. But either choose to stay on the safe side because of extreme risk aversion and quite certainly because of monopolies or vendor-lock-in.
  - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    >there would have been insurance companies that understood statistics and deep, local and domain- knowledge Sounds like a perfect job for an AI-actuary-based insurance company.
taneq 3y ago
> These tulip farms will continue to use as much pesticides and herbicides as before regardless of mechanical pest controls. Not if robots are cheaper than the poisons. Your point about insurance is interesting, the industry would do a massive backflip on pesticides if some robotics company managed to convince insurance companies that using their product was less risky than chemical means.

jetrink 3y ago

A hybrid approach would work well too in some situations. When I worked in wetland restoration, one thing we did to reduce the ecological impact of herbicides was to cut the weeds a few inches above the water or soil, and then to paint herbicide directly on the cut face with a foam brush. This was a lot more labor intensive than spraying, but reduced the amount of herbicide used by 80-90%, and prevented any from landing in the water via over-spray. Even without the cutting step, applying herbicide directly to the weeds with a brush would be a big improvement over spraying.

rob74 3y ago

Yes - this is exactly what AI/robotics should be targeted at - things that currently would have to be done manually, but aren't feasible (at least not in high-wage countries) like this one, or sorting mixed trash into non-recyclable and recyclable (and further into various metals and plastics) etc. Instead, it's targeted at replacing graphics artists and software developers...

bumby 3y ago
Why not both? Manual work has been getting automated away for over a century. Tech has already eroded low and middle class jobs for decades. To think that similar won't happen in knowledge work (or that we shouldn't let it), feels like a very techy type of NIMBYism
- bigfudge 3y ago
  Because one will be a net benefit to society and the other probably won’t be?
  - bumby 3y ago
    Can you elaborate? Because it's not immediately clear to me the distinction. I'll concede that automating manual labor has made consumer products cheaper. Whether that is wholly a net benefit, I think, is up for debate. When you consider the externalities like the environmental effects of rampant consumerism and the erosion of the middle class via a reduction in manufacturing jobs, I think there's plenty of basis for at least arguing there is tipping point on automating away manual labor. To say automating manual labor bluntly (and without careful consideration of blowback) always leads to a better society, I think one needs to define what they mean as society and what metrics they're using to define "better." I, personally, don't think raw GDP is a good measure of the health of a society. If anything, I think automating knowledge work has as at least a potentially larger upside. The downside will largely be borne by the upper-middle and upper-classes, which is why the GGP can read like a classist perspective.
    - 3y ago

lossolo 3y ago

Check out this one "Sniper robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV0cR_Nhac0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV0cR_Nhac0

scns 3y ago
Fantastic! Thank you.

bumby 3y ago

I agree, there is a lot of delicate and manual agricultural work that I would like see AI tackle. But this doesn't seem to be one of them. The article is a little light on the details, but it doesn't look like this robut does any manual work on the flowers. Rather, it seems like it uses image recognition to plot the GPS coordinates of potential sick plants (with the assumption that a human will follow up to remove them manually if necessary).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kjkjadksj 3y ago

At the end of the day its still cheaper to spray pesticide so thats what the farmer will do, unless regulated.

rurban 3y ago
For sure not. Visual AI is taking over now (because it scales easily), robots already did so.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  What is cheaper, a robot that has a vision program to identify pests and target them alone, or a robot that just has to spray pesticide?
  - rurban 3y ago
    Vision by far, a lot more zeros for a robot. Pest control targetting is still done manually, unless you buy this expensive robot. But harvesting robots are already used in the field, and real-time vision helps there.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

barbazoo 3y ago

Totally, depends on what's cheaper though as that's what farmers will choose, no matter what stage of the climate crisis we're in.

randomdata 3y ago
Speaking as a farmer – the farmer will always choose what the consumer wants. Any deviation from that and you won't be farming for long. Granted, what's cheapest is usually what the consumer wants.

DesiLurker 3y ago

"all I want is my frickin lasers attached to my frickin weedbot"