This was my thought but I suspect for rice farming its easier than wheeled based devices. As you can imagine rice paddies are a bastard for wheels, because its

This was my thought but I suspect for rice farming its easier than wheeled based devices. As you can imagine rice paddies are a bastard for wheels, because its muddy as fuck. Its not like its economical to put a cement pan underneath as some rice plants have >1m roots[1] so you can't treat it like watercress (thats a wild assertion, maybe you can) Also, the banks that hold the water to make it a paddy are unlikely to be regular or load bearing. Moreover, the fields are not laid out with a road to link them all together. So conventional tractor with thin wheels/floaters just won't work. And smaller vehicles are just impractically heavy or impossible to get into most fields. As for the AI shit, I don't think there is acutally that much. It looks a lot like its just standard drone mapping/possible machine vision to detect the state of the crops/border of the field. Would this scale up for western style large fields? no. but for small irregular terrace style fieldlets, it would [1]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1626/pps.3.281 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1626/pps.3.281