Farming goes from broad selection against pests with chemicals to introducing a massive selection pressure towards biological mimicry and adversarial image attacks.
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.
> 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
I think evolution over longer timespans is the algorithm that keeps giving. In a single run it created all life and current technology. Evolution is radically open-ended, and that's how it gets around deceptive search spaces.
> 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.
As long as a mutation isn't drastically harmful, it may persist in the population to be built upon later.
> 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...
They have evolved quite a few of these. Try and clear a lawn of dandelions and you'll discover they regenerate from their taproot if you leave any of it in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry indicates another, where false flax has evolved based on a human invention, winnowing machines, to evade them.
Rye grain evolved so effectively based on human activity that it went from weed to useful crop, even.
You're missing another remarkable ability of nature - coevolved species with humans. In essence, they keep evolving until humans find a use for them in their lives (be it personal, medical, industrial, etc) and then end up caring/nurturing them. Or another way to phrase it: The weeds evolve so they don't compete with the crops the human grows.
A few examples come to mind:
- "Clovers" fix nitrogen in the ground, other plants can take that nitrogen from the ground, some gardeners now intentionally keep this weed to benefit the plants they are growing for crops. I think the term is called "rotating cover crop".
- "Comfrey" has incredibly long tap root which mines minerals and stores those in the leaves. Gardners/farms can plant comfrey, chop the entire top off, the decaying leaves release the minerals into the surface soil for the surround crop plants to utilize. Without comfrey, those minerals would of been locked away from the main crop. After the comfrey is cut, it grows back the leaves again and the gardener/farmer can repeat this cycle.
- Some weeds attract beneficial insects to the garden/farm and thus benefit the main crop. Wise gardener/farmer would keep these around. For example, more bees means more insect pollinated fruit to be grown.
The pattern with highly competitive specifies results in either extinction of one of the species or a mutual beneficial evolution. For example:
- "Bull horn Acacia tree" - Ants and the tree have co-evolved that in the present they are highly depend on each other for survival. In the history, at one point when the ants and tree were introduced the ants brought a lot of acacia tree destruction followed by ant death because of loss of food source - but over time the trees that benefited the ants got selected along with the ants that were compatible with the trees.
If you'd like to learn more on the topic of coevolved species, I recommend this 30 min video on the topic https://youtu.be/hCAvBmY7ZgA
I don't know what this robot will do, the story is being currently written so we will see what happens!
I know this is supposed to be a joke, but come on. In what possible world would this ever happen? They're not dragging this over people lying down in a field and I doubt the technology is even made to not target humans because they're never in target range.
> Seeds that are thrown the same distance as flax seeds have thus been selected for, making it near impossible to separate the seeds of these two species.
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.
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.
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.
The link at [1] seems to be mostly about "pasture and rangeland weed control" with limited applications to forestry and crops. The examples for those are good, but seem at a glance application-specific. The most general recommendation for crops is to use animals during the pasture rotation of a plot to reduce weed pressure during a growing rotation.
[2]: Again, great, but very crop-specific.
[3]: I've seen/used mulching on permaculture farms, and it seems like a fairly effective method. Also has the benefits of reducing the need for water, and regenerating topsoil via decomposition. But labor-intensive. The clover idea is very interesting and new to me.
> I wish we would spend more time rethinking our industrial farming practices, rather than try to prop them up with diesel burning robots.
Agree wholeheartedly! And if the answer is that more labor is required to farm sustainably, then I'm personally all for that. But I'm also pragmatic, and if we could improve the economics of sustainable farming by automating some of the manual labor, I think that would be great. I'm not sure this specific robot addresses that - it seems designed for industrial monoculture farms - but it's an interesting idea to me.
You never see one but there is one: cover weeds. Weeds are only grow where the soil is uncovered.
In small scale you also can mulch with compost but in large scale you need other ways.
One benefit of a covered soil is more moisture in the soil even in dry climates.
Weeds are any plants competing for resources with the current crop. They will have to managed some way, hopefully with less negative externalities than in the current industrial monocultural farming.
> This "weed problem" comes from a farming not going with but against the nature.
All farming is "going against nature", by definition.
Take a 100m by 100m field and let it go "with nature" for 10 years. Do you think it'll magically sprout tons of wheat? It'll be great for plants and animals, that's for sure, but we can't eat what will be growing there.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
55kW at 240V is only 230A. A typical house gets 200A service. It’s a lot of power, but you wouldn’t have to move mountains to get it if you worked at a lab that needed it. It could be had for less than the price of many used cars.
Just a point of clarification, for a CO2 laser, getting 150 optical watts out the aperture usually means putting about 1500 electrical watts into the tube. The rest comes out as heat in the water jacket, which you pass through a radiator or possibly an active chiller, and those pumps and fans draw their own power as well.
And before those 1500W get into the tube, they go through a high-voltage power supply, which is maybe 80% efficient if you're lucky. All-up power draw on a laser of that scale is somewhere north of 2KW from the wall.
(And before anyone asks: Yes this is very good efficiency for a laser, which is one reason why CO2 is so popular. YAG and fiber lasers tend to be in the low single-digit percents.)
Oh it's for sure an energy hog and the 20 acres is marketing.
Super interesting especially think of it as in its infancy. Also would be interested to see how the real world results are. I'm guessing it can laser all life but I would be curious to see how well the algorithm worked with protecting certain species.
It's driving on asphalt in a parking lot. Do they have a video of the device following the grooves over mud? (It would be not surprising, because other automated tractors can do that.)
It would be more interesting to see a video where they fire the lasers. Can it aim while moving? Can it aim while the engine is on and everything is vibrating?
There's a video on YouTube of a walk around. https://youtu.be/fK3AQgt47z4 The CEO of the company describes it as "an all diesel hydraulic system." Essentially there's a big generator to drive it around and provide power to the pew pew lasers.
This is in no small part because of the massive subsidization of fuel for farming in most countries. Not only is the fuel for agriculture heavily discounted, but what you do pay can be written off against your revenues.
Same with most fisheries.
If governments want these sectors to go green, that is going to be a very big and painful band-aid to peel off.
At that point, is this more environmental than applying Round-Up to the field?
Each of these lumbering beasts goes 5 MPH, burning diesel the entire time. How many gallons of gas is going to be spent weeding a hundred acres of farmland?
For example, replacing a deforested area might sometimes be faster by introducing a non-native invasive species. From a carbon perspective it would be a net-good, from an ecosystem perspective it would be a net-bad. Which is more important?
>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
That doesn't seem odd to me at all. The whole point of this thing is to let it run all day killing weeds while you do other stuff. The fact it only has a max of 5mph (and likely significantly slower when there are actual weeds to kill) means you would spend all day every day in the field trying to take care of weeds.
When they spray for weeds they're going significantly faster than that and cover a massive swath in one pass, and that's generally outsourced to someone other than the farmer himself. This looks like it's good for maybe 3 rows at a time.
Yeah. But I wonder if putting it all in one was for better coupling between shooting laser control vs the whole cart moving around (for example, slowing down/stopping when the weed density goes up).
I noticed this thing uses hydraulic drive motors... I assume that was so they could run the engine as 'electrical first', but I also wonder if it gives them better start/stop control of the cart.
I guess I don't follow what the advantage would be. Putting hours and wear/tear on a $250k tractor that you likely have other uses for in order to cut what? $10k off the price of this for the cummins motor and hydraulics? It would need power generation of some sort, so you'd be doing PTO off the tractor instead to drive a generator.
I'd imagine the end result would be more fuel and in the long run more expense.
The advantage with tractor-pulled is lower cost and higher reliability. The propulsion, guidance, and power-supply problem has been dealt with by industry already and is already owned by the farmer. The autonomous weeding machine will undoubtedly have issues with these three functions, which means down-time and cost. The machine would be cheaper if tractor-pulled, and the developers could focus on the problem at hand. Also, the tractor driver could periodically stop to monitor and tweak the weed killer, especially important given the new technology. We did a recent project with a farming implement that could have been autonomous, and when one is realistic with reliability and maintenance costs (unless one intends a McDonald's ice-cream machine repair business model) then the argument for tractor-pulled is very strong.
100% agree and that's what my original comment was trying to get at.
I can see selling two models, one autonomous, one three point hitch / PTO. The advantage of the latter is clear to me.
But then the product starts to look a lot less sci-fi, doesn't it? We already have pull-behind weed burners that use propane torches and not lasers. The only "magic" would be in the AI recognition systems (which I have questions about.) Perhaps one could not get investment $$ for it then :-(
Also propane torches seem more efficient to me than converting diesel combustion to electricity to heat energy.
I think the difference is that propane torches are an imprecise mechanism generally used to clear dead area between planted rows, while this laser based solution could be used selectively within a planted row (provided it is real at all).
Fully agreed about the 3-point comment though. Why take on building an autonomous tractor AND a targeted weed-killer, rather than tackling the differentiating problem only? Seems like a hype train measure. Or the systems integration is very important, in which case a partnership would be the obvious route or white-labeling an autonomous tractor. Regardless, this strategy seems very weird to me too.
Right, which is why I think it's likely a result of VC direction. It's not enough to have a profitable or sensible product, it has to be something that can sell in acquisition for 10 or 100 x the investment given.
"Autonomous vehicles are hot and AI is hot, go with that."
>The advantage with tractor-pulled is lower cost and higher reliability.
Based on what? The cummins engine they're using is bulletproof and a rounding error in the cost of the unit. Hydraulic motors will run for 10s of thousands of hours without any maintenance beyond a fluid change.
People in this thread keep claiming tractors are fully autonomous, which model? If they aren't fully autonomous, what farmer is volunteering to spend hundreds to thousands of hours in their tractor doing nothing but putting along at 5mph stop-and-go while this thing zaps weeds?
My theory is JD,Case already have the tech to be level 4 autonomous but they haven't figured out how to make more revenue than selling $250K quad-tracs with 'some' autonomy.
Thousands... millions of farmers already putting along doing nothing but dragging a cultivator / sprayer / fertilizer spreader / bush hog / rototiller / weed badger / manure spreader etc. etc.
I assume you haven't farmed? You don't run any of those implements at 5mph with a 3-row spread. It would literally be impossible to run a modern farm at those speeds and spread.
Maybe it's because the robot needs different amounts of time for different patches of soil? As in, it kinda needs to go its own pace to a) ensure it has enough time to detect and kill all weeds (which depends on weed density, presumably - the video shows it only killing one at a time) and b) maybe it has to stop to ensure it hits the right thing because it can't handle moving targets (not clear from the video)?
No idea if this is something that modern tractors could accommodate already or whether it would need some annoying human-in-the-loop stop and go.
> The energy usage should be minimal - it doesn't take much power to burn a leaf.
This is certainly true for dry plants. If they're weeds, they're actively growing, so they are trapping a lot of moisture that could make it hard to burn. If the weeds are a problem, then they're going to be growing. Many weeds, too, will continue to grow, even if their leaves are damaged or removed.
I think we might be using different definitions of "burn." I mean burnt by radiation so it no longer photosynthesizes -- in some plants this can happen simply from overexposure to sunlight. It's not necessary to turn it to ash.
A machine continually damaging cotyledons in emerging seedlings would go a long way. That's part of the advantage of a continually running weed killer.
Instead of a laser, I wonder if it would make sense to use positioned lenses and have the robot focus the sun's rays on each weed to burn it out. Though that probably would cause fires and would only be usable during certain hours of the day.
I could easily be wrong on this, but my understanding is that a laser is highly focused to one spot. A lens would have a wider spread and would also heat up the area surrounding the target to the point that it could ignite.
I don't see why power would be an issue. Why do you even assume there's a huge battery instead of a diesel engine and generator?
Having this thing be autonomous makes it more expensive to acquire, yes, but way cheaper to operate because the labor cost of pulling this thing with a non-autonomous tractor is quite large (even if the tractor were autonomous, having two autonomous robots doing different things is better than having one doing two different things that might halve its availability for each kind of task). This is a very big deal. If labor were a non-issue we'd have people weeding manually and we'd not use herbicides. Everything in farming is about labor, which is why we've gone from being agrarian societies to industrial and post-industrial ones: by bringing economies of scale to agriculture in order to greatly reduce labor costs in agriculture.
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
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, but if everyone pays $1 more then the wages can increase by $10 assuming 10% of the population works in agriculture which still leaves them $9 better off. My point was just that a wage increase is not nullified by the price increase as long as not everyone is working in the fields.
That’s a collective action problem. You can’t get everyone to pay $1 more. If your strawberries (for example) cost $1 more per pint then your sales will drop accordingly. It doesn’t matter if all strawberry farms agree to pay more to their strawberry pickers. You aren’t only competing against other strawberry farms, you’re competing against all other food. If strawberries are too expensive, people will eat candy or potato chips instead.
So it turn out that people or not willing to pay what it costs to produce strawberries at a wage level at which people are willing to do the hard work. That's fine. The farmer should try to lower the costs by automation or switch to producing potatoes for those potato chips.
Not following you. We've had drought in CA for years now. There are fights over where water goes, and a lot goes to farming. Then a bunch of those farm products are exported. Do we focus on serving the people in CA or the exports from CA when we talk about water regulation?
My original point is that even though we produce a crazy amount of farmed goods in CA, we still import things that we grow here and export. Always seems odd to me to see produce from Ecuador in the grocery store when I can buy better quality down the road from a local farm stand.
The Ecuadorian produce is cheaper. If you want local produce buy it from the stand. The water rights stuff is pretty messed up anyway, because the us is essentially stealing water that used to go to Mexico.
I'd push back on that a little bit. I grew up on a farm that's still operating today, and it truly is difficult to find people to work those jobs. The farm pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more sporadic/seasonal. When harvest rolls around, farmers need to get the crop out of the ground ASAP. That means 10-14 hour days for 4 weeks straight, otherwise, you'll lose product. It can be physically demanding and monotonous work.
But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something very important: providing food.
So I think it falls into a similar category of "college is over-emphasized and we have a dwindling supply of trades-workers". While in school in a rural farm town, I never once heard anyone say "what about farming?" when discussing future career choices. It's not marketed as an attractive option. Maybe it's as simple as "farmers have the work-life balance of an emergency room doctor while making ~1/6th" (source: Dad is the farmer, Brother-in-law is the doctor)
Anyway, it's a problem I think about a lot. I didn't get into farming, but in many ways I wish I had, because it's a highly undervalued skill with a very rewarding outcome: you feed communities. How do we change the narrative? Do we need policy changes? Continued technological advancement? A push to educate the next generation of farmers within schools? I'm not sure, but I don't think it's always as simple as saying "it doesn't pay enough". That _is_ an issue, but it's not the only issue.
> pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more sporadic/seasonal
If it pays as much as other jobs with shorter, less sporadic hours, it's underpaid.
> But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something very important: providing food.
I'd love to take a break from my job once in a while to do some other, probably more manual work.
I think everyone used to go back to the countryside to help with harvest during summer, bur I feel overspecialized these days. How about incentivizing companies to take more part-time workers (as in, do not make it difficult to do so)? Together with minimal wages, it could be quite interesting. I also think having a broader skillset (more people helping) would help quite a bit: If I worked part-time at a bakery, I could probably help them with their computer/electronics troubles, for instance.
My uncle was a farmer, and I had odd jobs on the farm. I remember the potato harvest as being cold, back-breaking and utterly boring hard work. I've also been a fruit picker, wasn't much better.
But. I survived my early 20's on these kinds of jobs while I sorted my shit out. I'm grateful for the experience and the ability to support myself while I did that.
There was an artile on HN about the influence of movies on "cool".
After Jurassic park, there was a huge uptick in paleontology, and everything else related, even Veterianism (!).
Most of the currents that kids get from movies are destructive to society IMO, but if it could be tapped into - it is a source of influence. Humans naturally copy what they see.
If a series of movies with the hero being an entomologist came out, it would do us good. If there were a bunch of farm boys that played with nature in a way that made it cool, we would harvest the benefits for generations.
Certainly we need a cultural shift towards honoring ALL kinds of work, but if as you said, the work is hard, sporadic, and long hours, then of course no one wants to do it if there are other options that pay the same but lack those features.
A mere 125 years ago it required the majority of the US workforce to farm enough food for people to eat. The mechanization of agriculture enabled much of the technological and cultural progress of the past couple centuries.
They actually pay pretty well considering ($15-20/hr in some cases,) it's just very hard work. You also have to consider that farms don't make much money. They don't have massive margins like Google and a single bad weather event can wipe out any profit for the year.
It's kind of a shitty job no matter how much you pay. The work is seasonal so the people doing this have to move around following the work. It's also in remote locations, there aren't apartments for rent right next to the farm. Often the farm has to provide housing, which of course means they will do whatever they can to cut costs. Internet and cell reception are going to be abysmal, nothing but farmland for miles in every direction. And you're constantly on the move following the next job. Don't get me wrong, there are some serious things that can and need to be done to improve the industry, but even with all of those fixed it's not a job for everyone.
Manual weeding is really not a job people want to do in the developed world. IMO it's the worst part of farming in that requires working at ground level all day and needs to be done every couple weeks. It will wipe you out physically. Typically people who have to do this for long and have any other job available to them will switch even for a pay cut, but farmers can't really offer much because food production is low-margin (and in the USA they are competing with farms that use herbicides).
I'm not sure that's really the reason, but at the same time it seems the overall tendency is to invest more in machinery and automation rather than pay better wages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those 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.
I 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.
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.
No 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.
Unless 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.
One mirror mounted on the drone would be enough. And a strong enough laser device at a stationary position. Of course, the challenge would be to hit the mirror and not the drone ...
It 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.
Yes 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
Wire 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.
Any kind of wired setup would interfere with other tractors they use in the field. Fertilization, and eventually harvesting.
I’m not sure why people are inventing more complicated solutions when this robot seems to handle the job quite well without them. It covers 20 acres in a day, you can likely keep 100+ acres weed free continuously without any other special gimmicks.
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.
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.
>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.
That 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.
> 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.
It’s not ridiculous at all, hours count. I haven’t looked at the article, but I’m assuming it’s the same machine, it’s a 10,000 pound unit with tiny little tires and a 75 hp diesel engine. It’s going to compact the soil, get stuck, and waste fuel driving around looking for weeds.
If sending a 20 pound gas drone with a 2 TB solid-state drive and 60 FPS 4K camera on it up and down the field for one 100th of the fuel consumption once a week saves 500 hours a year off that beast, it’d probably be worth it.
> It’s going to compact the soil, get stuck, and waste fuel driving around looking for weeds.
This true of any modern farming equipment, which is why planting strategy is so critical--I kept messing up in my first year as I was going way too fast instead of taking my time and my planted rows were never straight, it was in a green house and we had an old diesel tractor so my lungs were hurting after the first hour and I just compromised on that aspect.
But then when I had to go back and weed, maintain and eventually harvest the oddly planted fields of salads and potatoes I made sure to follow the natural ebb and flow of the soil compaction, which was there even after it was tilled.
What I'm saying is that the compacted soil can help you in later seasons to maintain the direction of growth so it's not entirely a bad thing to have. And unless you farmed the same fields for several seasons/years you would overlook this as a net benefit. Eventually seasoned farm hands can do it while drinking and smoking and just listening to how the engine is struggling without even touching the steering wheel, they can even get out of the tractor and walk ahead of it as it's crawling forward to check if everything is fine. Where as for apprentices like myself who had no real experience in Ag it was a remarkable discovery that one shouldn't overlook.
Also, drones are already widely in use; they monitor temperature and moisture in real time and a offer other services right now [0]. Their is a company that I found that posted here on YC a few years ago that offers this as a service [1].
I was actually going to get my commercial drone's license a couple month's before I retired as a farm manager in Hawaii due to extensive injuries, but my fintech startup required saving and scraping all my pennies to afford getting it off the ground. I might consider getting it again as things start to be more widely deployed and the costs keep coming down and I still would like to be involved in some capacity in Ag.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Drones don't need to be battery operated - but, I agree that there is no reason to use them in fields which are already designed for vehicle access with semi-standardized dimensions.
There's probably something to be said for hard-wired drones here. The weight of the cable is something you have to contend with, but with a physical wire you can run a larger drone longer.
Given that the plants are on the ground, I imagine not sweeping over them with an extension cable would be an obvious advantage. Still, you could work with suspended powerlines as easily for the big-box drone as with tractors, which brings me to another (probably dumb) question: Why has nobody built a landline electric tractor?
Farmers sweep things along the field all the time. The standard farming sprinkler is supplied by pipes / hoses which are bridged above crop height between wheeled towers. As the spinkler works its way in a circle on the field around the water supply, the towers roll over a negligible amount of crop.
I'll bet there's creative solutions that could take advantage of a hub and spoke model. Picture a solar recharging base station that drones can dock with to charge while others rotate in.
DJI has some demonstration of target pesticide spreading drone 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.
Drones 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'
I 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.
Pretty 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.
The scene from Spies Like Us always comes to mind when bouncing lasers around. Or the Real Genius as well. So you better be careful using this around corn fields, or we know what can happen.
Completely 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.
IMO; 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.
When 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.
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.
RTK GPS is used as a second factor to vision in these machines. It’s just not good enough to target with as a sole / primary factor in the real world though. Bit of drift and whoops, $30,000 of crop gone.
Lasers are not used because they’re expensive and dangerous. And Co2 lasers (as per the machine in the article) are powerful but super fragile.
Water shooting around at high pressure is in no way efficient or easy to handle.
Thanks for posting this, very interesting. The linkedin profile pointed to a youtube video (unlisted) that was pretty interesting and covered how they could calculate eye safely using simple math that indicated the safe distance was 2 meters away. They appeared to be using blue LEDs at high intensity to char-or-inactivate weed photosynthesis.
That's what made sense for my company; we just identify the crop, and then churn up all the areas of dirt that are "not crop". Also, hey, free cultivation. Do it often enough, and your weeds never even get that large, which also greatly increases your identification accuracy.
Non-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...
I 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.
Bacteria and viruses do that, but weeds first don't reproduce as fast and second humans can see them and find out something like treating crop seeds with fluorescent color.
It sounds like a slow process but plant life cycles are yearly compared to 20+ years for human generations to spawn, it will happen faster than you think. There are already round up resistant weeds and it's only been 50 years.
Even 30 years after first implementation would be several generations of better hardware and software. Spectra is just one way to get v1 out the door, there are many ways you can improve things.
Crops are planted in a specific pattern, at a specific time, grow at a specific rate, and have a unique shape. So you have a lot of information to work with.
Well, that's right, and I didn't think of it. But besides what the sibling comments pointed out, that's an issue with any kind of weeding, including manual.
The answer is to select according to a wide range of criteria, and not rely on a single one. That way, weeds cannot progressively acquire resistance, and need to check all the boxes at once, which makes it highly unlikely that they will pass on their "slightly better" genes.
And of course, the larger the scale you employ a single weeding system at, the more risky it gets. It would be great for supplementing herbicide (while lowering doses) at first, for instance.
That makes me think that this also makes crop-rotation obsolete. You can plant 20 different crops in the same field, in repeating sequence. The bot will take care of them as-needed, and next season, move everything down one slot.
Well, right, but it doesn't need particularly impressive algotithms to achieve something with that data. Those algorithms were here 20 years ago, with less processing power and camera resolution.
I think the AI solution is actually pretty well proven. I use PlantNet to identify weeds in my yard and it's plenty accurate and doesn't require any sort of advanced sensor.
Could be, but having more discriminating data as an input can only improve speed and accuracy. I don't know what technology they picked for the first iteration, but can only imagine they'll end up using every trick in the book going forward.
A slightly more advanced sensor or lighting apparatus wouldn't cost much more, proportionately to the cost of the whole system.
The cost would be acquiring a training data set that includes data from the more advanced sensor, versus existing catalogs with many millions of images and tens of thousands of species.
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.
> 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.
I 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.
Don'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)
I 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.
Monsanto.....doesn't exist anymore....Laughable people hate on Monsanto/Bayer for protecting their IP, but when big tech does it it's just good business
i'm sure i'm oversimplifying but if you can reliably identify your crop then everything else is a weed. Maybe put some kind of GMO marker that makes what you want to keep stick out like a sore thumb then you just nuke everything else.
This is the traditional approach and it really blows my mind that so many hammer-syndrome AI/ML/flavor-of-the-month VC spenders haven't simply gone to see for themselves what works on farms. It probably doesn't even register to the casual observer, but planting a careful row of tomatoes with the root ball in a particular direction is a fit for the cultivator tool to come by and turn the soil up on the stem of the young, but now established plant.
That's actually the "weed control at scale" developed in conjunction with the tractor.
I'm not a fan of modern conventional agriculture. The abuse done to topsoil is terrible, and we need better systems. But new systems need to keep their eye on the ball and the ball is a John Deere pulling a 40-foot cultivator across a field while the "operator" reads twitter ( or <verb>s Clubhouse ) only looking up to mind the turns.
Everything starts somewhere, but just because your tech has ML and Laserbeams doesn't mean it passes the tool/toy test.
I 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.
Whether 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.
Open 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.
Sounds 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.
My 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.
Actually, 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.
I'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.
My 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 365 ms ] threadFirst, 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.
I think evolution over longer timespans is the algorithm that keeps giving. In a single run it created all life and current technology. Evolution is radically open-ended, and that's how it gets around deceptive search spaces.
Not the case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex... gives us a concrete example of this; the ability to metabolize citrate required two mutations, the first of which isn't useful on its own.
As long as a mutation isn't drastically harmful, it may persist in the population to be built upon later.
> 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...
They have evolved quite a few of these. Try and clear a lawn of dandelions and you'll discover they regenerate from their taproot if you leave any of it in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry indicates another, where false flax has evolved based on a human invention, winnowing machines, to evade them.
Rye grain evolved so effectively based on human activity that it went from weed to useful crop, even.
A few examples come to mind:
- "Clovers" fix nitrogen in the ground, other plants can take that nitrogen from the ground, some gardeners now intentionally keep this weed to benefit the plants they are growing for crops. I think the term is called "rotating cover crop".
- "Comfrey" has incredibly long tap root which mines minerals and stores those in the leaves. Gardners/farms can plant comfrey, chop the entire top off, the decaying leaves release the minerals into the surface soil for the surround crop plants to utilize. Without comfrey, those minerals would of been locked away from the main crop. After the comfrey is cut, it grows back the leaves again and the gardener/farmer can repeat this cycle.
- Some weeds attract beneficial insects to the garden/farm and thus benefit the main crop. Wise gardener/farmer would keep these around. For example, more bees means more insect pollinated fruit to be grown.
The pattern with highly competitive specifies results in either extinction of one of the species or a mutual beneficial evolution. For example:
- "Bull horn Acacia tree" - Ants and the tree have co-evolved that in the present they are highly depend on each other for survival. In the history, at one point when the ants and tree were introduced the ants brought a lot of acacia tree destruction followed by ant death because of loss of food source - but over time the trees that benefited the ants got selected along with the ants that were compatible with the trees.
If you'd like to learn more on the topic of coevolved species, I recommend this 30 min video on the topic https://youtu.be/hCAvBmY7ZgA
I don't know what this robot will do, the story is being currently written so we will see what happens!
And eventually the humans will too.
Typographic ML attacks work and are pretty funny.
Elsewhere on this thread is a great example of this in practice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
> Seeds that are thrown the same distance as flax seeds have thus been selected for, making it near impossible to separate the seeds of these two species.
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_A... [2] https://web-japan.org/trends01/article/021022sci_r.html [3] https://eorganic.org/node/2535
[2]: Again, great, but very crop-specific.
[3]: I've seen/used mulching on permaculture farms, and it seems like a fairly effective method. Also has the benefits of reducing the need for water, and regenerating topsoil via decomposition. But labor-intensive. The clover idea is very interesting and new to me.
> I wish we would spend more time rethinking our industrial farming practices, rather than try to prop them up with diesel burning robots.
Agree wholeheartedly! And if the answer is that more labor is required to farm sustainably, then I'm personally all for that. But I'm also pragmatic, and if we could improve the economics of sustainable farming by automating some of the manual labor, I think that would be great. I'm not sure this specific robot addresses that - it seems designed for industrial monoculture farms - but it's an interesting idea to me.
All farming is "going against nature", by definition.
Take a 100m by 100m field and let it go "with nature" for 10 years. Do you think it'll magically sprout tons of wheat? It'll be great for plants and animals, that's for sure, but we can't eat what will be growing there.
Yes, I'm sure their customers will buy expensive machines that don't work. Haha, farmers are dumb, am I right?
Ugh.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ACmydtFDTGs
It does this well.
Unfortunately, the hot dog is the only thing that it can positively identify. Everything else is "Not A Hot Dog."
https://medium.com/@timanglade/how-hbos-silicon-valley-built...
Satisfying slowmo killshots near end :)
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.
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.
Meh. Worse case you could even have a wire.
[1] https://carbonrobotics.com/features
https://carbonrobotics.com/features
Lasers are 150 watts, so a small fraction of the power draw.
Seems like getting the automation is key, replacing herbicides would require multiple passes over the same ground.
Lasers are notoriously inefficient, CO2 ones are in the 5-20% range.
So probably at least 1000W for the lasers, assuming 10% efficiency.
Salivating because that's a lot of power that you can use for experiments, much more than most laser technicians have ever seen.
Horrified because not only are you going to go instantly blind (as usual), but now the rest of your head will smolder too.
And before those 1500W get into the tube, they go through a high-voltage power supply, which is maybe 80% efficient if you're lucky. All-up power draw on a laser of that scale is somewhere north of 2KW from the wall.
(And before anyone asks: Yes this is very good efficiency for a laser, which is one reason why CO2 is so popular. YAG and fiber lasers tend to be in the low single-digit percents.)
Super interesting especially think of it as in its infancy. Also would be interested to see how the real world results are. I'm guessing it can laser all life but I would be curious to see how well the algorithm worked with protecting certain species.
(Video of an operating unit)
There is nothing particularly unbelievable about the device, and it seems, as such innovations tend to be, quite obvious.
It would be more interesting to see a video where they fire the lasers. Can it aim while moving? Can it aim while the engine is on and everything is vibrating?
Same with most fisheries.
If governments want these sectors to go green, that is going to be a very big and painful band-aid to peel off.
How is that different from any other business expense in any other industry.
It’s not some special loophole.
If you use $1000 of electricity to harvest your crops, that $1000 would be equally as deductible because it’s just a cost of production?
Each of these lumbering beasts goes 5 MPH, burning diesel the entire time. How many gallons of gas is going to be spent weeding a hundred acres of farmland?
For example, replacing a deforested area might sometimes be faster by introducing a non-native invasive species. From a carbon perspective it would be a net-good, from an ecosystem perspective it would be a net-bad. Which is more important?
That doesn't seem odd to me at all. The whole point of this thing is to let it run all day killing weeds while you do other stuff. The fact it only has a max of 5mph (and likely significantly slower when there are actual weeds to kill) means you would spend all day every day in the field trying to take care of weeds.
When they spray for weeds they're going significantly faster than that and cover a massive swath in one pass, and that's generally outsourced to someone other than the farmer himself. This looks like it's good for maybe 3 rows at a time.
There's a lot of automated tractors now
I noticed this thing uses hydraulic drive motors... I assume that was so they could run the engine as 'electrical first', but I also wonder if it gives them better start/stop control of the cart.
I'd imagine the end result would be more fuel and in the long run more expense.
I can see selling two models, one autonomous, one three point hitch / PTO. The advantage of the latter is clear to me.
But then the product starts to look a lot less sci-fi, doesn't it? We already have pull-behind weed burners that use propane torches and not lasers. The only "magic" would be in the AI recognition systems (which I have questions about.) Perhaps one could not get investment $$ for it then :-(
Also propane torches seem more efficient to me than converting diesel combustion to electricity to heat energy.
Fully agreed about the 3-point comment though. Why take on building an autonomous tractor AND a targeted weed-killer, rather than tackling the differentiating problem only? Seems like a hype train measure. Or the systems integration is very important, in which case a partnership would be the obvious route or white-labeling an autonomous tractor. Regardless, this strategy seems very weird to me too.
"Autonomous vehicles are hot and AI is hot, go with that."
Based on what? The cummins engine they're using is bulletproof and a rounding error in the cost of the unit. Hydraulic motors will run for 10s of thousands of hours without any maintenance beyond a fluid change.
People in this thread keep claiming tractors are fully autonomous, which model? If they aren't fully autonomous, what farmer is volunteering to spend hundreds to thousands of hours in their tractor doing nothing but putting along at 5mph stop-and-go while this thing zaps weeds?
https://www.protocol.com/john-deere-farming-ai-autonomous
https://thinkingagriculture.io/the-agriculture-unicorn-hidin...
No idea if this is something that modern tractors could accommodate already or whether it would need some annoying human-in-the-loop stop and go.
If you pull it behind a tractor, you need to hire someone to drive the tractor. This defeats the purpose of an autonomous weeding system.
This is certainly true for dry plants. If they're weeds, they're actively growing, so they are trapping a lot of moisture that could make it hard to burn. If the weeds are a problem, then they're going to be growing. Many weeds, too, will continue to grow, even if their leaves are damaged or removed.
A machine continually damaging cotyledons in emerging seedlings would go a long way. That's part of the advantage of a continually running weed killer.
Limiting usage to when the light will be strong enough to be focused would seriously limit the hours of usage
Maybe adding solar panels to harness solar energy to offset ICE emissions would be a consideration
Having this thing be autonomous makes it more expensive to acquire, yes, but way cheaper to operate because the labor cost of pulling this thing with a non-autonomous tractor is quite large (even if the tractor were autonomous, having two autonomous robots doing different things is better than having one doing two different things that might halve its availability for each kind of task). This is a very big deal. If labor were a non-issue we'd have people weeding manually and we'd not use herbicides. Everything in farming is about labor, which is why we've gone from being agrarian societies to industrial and post-industrial ones: by bringing economies of scale to agriculture in order to greatly reduce labor costs in agriculture.
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.
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.
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
Contextual example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25749015
It was only a matter of time. A doom of our own making.
Translation: The wages we pay are crap and we're not going to pay them more.
But the market will always find the place where the work is unbearable and stop just shy of that.
You underestimate the percentage of the income some people spend on food. That's why agriculture is heavily subsidised.
That’s a collective action problem. You can’t get everyone to pay $1 more. If your strawberries (for example) cost $1 more per pint then your sales will drop accordingly. It doesn’t matter if all strawberry farms agree to pay more to their strawberry pickers. You aren’t only competing against other strawberry farms, you’re competing against all other food. If strawberries are too expensive, people will eat candy or potato chips instead.
In 2019, California agriculture produced about $50B in receipts, with almost $22B in exports. Our water goes with those exports too.
Now, that kind of nationalism is very uncalifornian.
My original point is that even though we produce a crazy amount of farmed goods in CA, we still import things that we grow here and export. Always seems odd to me to see produce from Ecuador in the grocery store when I can buy better quality down the road from a local farm stand.
But it's also incredibly fulfilling work, and it's a great example of a community-driven effort to accomplish something very important: providing food.
So I think it falls into a similar category of "college is over-emphasized and we have a dwindling supply of trades-workers". While in school in a rural farm town, I never once heard anyone say "what about farming?" when discussing future career choices. It's not marketed as an attractive option. Maybe it's as simple as "farmers have the work-life balance of an emergency room doctor while making ~1/6th" (source: Dad is the farmer, Brother-in-law is the doctor)
Anyway, it's a problem I think about a lot. I didn't get into farming, but in many ways I wish I had, because it's a highly undervalued skill with a very rewarding outcome: you feed communities. How do we change the narrative? Do we need policy changes? Continued technological advancement? A push to educate the next generation of farmers within schools? I'm not sure, but I don't think it's always as simple as saying "it doesn't pay enough". That _is_ an issue, but it's not the only issue.
If it pays as much as other jobs with shorter, less sporadic hours, it's underpaid.
I'd love to take a break from my job once in a while to do some other, probably more manual work.
I think everyone used to go back to the countryside to help with harvest during summer, bur I feel overspecialized these days. How about incentivizing companies to take more part-time workers (as in, do not make it difficult to do so)? Together with minimal wages, it could be quite interesting. I also think having a broader skillset (more people helping) would help quite a bit: If I worked part-time at a bakery, I could probably help them with their computer/electronics troubles, for instance.
But. I survived my early 20's on these kinds of jobs while I sorted my shit out. I'm grateful for the experience and the ability to support myself while I did that.
After Jurassic park, there was a huge uptick in paleontology, and everything else related, even Veterianism (!).
Most of the currents that kids get from movies are destructive to society IMO, but if it could be tapped into - it is a source of influence. Humans naturally copy what they see.
If a series of movies with the hero being an entomologist came out, it would do us good. If there were a bunch of farm boys that played with nature in a way that made it cool, we would harvest the benefits for generations.
for more: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-...
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.
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.
I think lasers for killing large animals (including us) will be prohibitively expensive for a long time to come, fingers crossed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser
1. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/africas...
Sound crazy? Now, pretend it's an injection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM
Although I keep thinking the movie Runaway (1984) is going to be a much truer representation of reality than I would like.
Both the drone and the ground robot would need milimiter precision geolocation to coordinate otherwise the laser can miss the weed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't need wires to be that rigid for that.
I’m not sure why people are inventing more complicated solutions when this robot seems to handle the job quite well without them. It covers 20 acres in a day, you can likely keep 100+ acres weed free continuously without any other special gimmicks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If sending a 20 pound gas drone with a 2 TB solid-state drive and 60 FPS 4K camera on it up and down the field for one 100th of the fuel consumption once a week saves 500 hours a year off that beast, it’d probably be worth it.
This true of any modern farming equipment, which is why planting strategy is so critical--I kept messing up in my first year as I was going way too fast instead of taking my time and my planted rows were never straight, it was in a green house and we had an old diesel tractor so my lungs were hurting after the first hour and I just compromised on that aspect.
But then when I had to go back and weed, maintain and eventually harvest the oddly planted fields of salads and potatoes I made sure to follow the natural ebb and flow of the soil compaction, which was there even after it was tilled.
What I'm saying is that the compacted soil can help you in later seasons to maintain the direction of growth so it's not entirely a bad thing to have. And unless you farmed the same fields for several seasons/years you would overlook this as a net benefit. Eventually seasoned farm hands can do it while drinking and smoking and just listening to how the engine is struggling without even touching the steering wheel, they can even get out of the tractor and walk ahead of it as it's crawling forward to check if everything is fine. Where as for apprentices like myself who had no real experience in Ag it was a remarkable discovery that one shouldn't overlook.
Also, drones are already widely in use; they monitor temperature and moisture in real time and a offer other services right now [0]. Their is a company that I found that posted here on YC a few years ago that offers this as a service [1].
I was actually going to get my commercial drone's license a couple month's before I retired as a farm manager in Hawaii due to extensive injuries, but my fintech startup required saving and scraping all my pennies to afford getting it off the ground. I might consider getting it again as things start to be more widely deployed and the costs keep coming down and I still would like to be involved in some capacity in Ag.
0:https://uavcoach.com/agricultural-drones/
1:https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/terravion
Farms are designed to be serviced by farm vehicles. A vehicle makes a lot of sense.
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.
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.
Given the climate change it could be the other way around. Zap some native saplings, which can no longer thrive.
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.
I'm not sure that's a great idea either, but flying brings more problems than it solves in this problem space.
Well, there are some robots that travel on aerial lines, typically used for cable inspection. Here's a quick search result: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robo...
And, hey, with unmanned drones over rural fields you won't get any Hindenburg disasters.
But I think it might be possible to focus sunlight to generate energy to kill weeds, not through battery or generated electricity.
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.
Also: no more chemical weed killers.
Do this with bugs, and get rid of insecticides as well.
My second thought was, "Please nobody invent a drone that shoots lasers at 'not hotdog'".
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.
Lasers are not used because they’re expensive and dangerous. And Co2 lasers (as per the machine in the article) are powerful but super fragile.
Water shooting around at high pressure is in no way efficient or easy to handle.
Compressed light is the technology that’s actually going to be used for precision weeding. It has the speed, power and simplicity of lasers, without the cost and danger: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:67899797724715...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnL3zYhBlVs
The gimbal alone on your flying drone will cost more than the entire river.
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#Agricult...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multispectral_image
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-spectrum_photography
...until they evolve to emit the same spectrum of light as the crops being harvested! Cuz you know that's going to happen.
Crops are planted in a specific pattern, at a specific time, grow at a specific rate, and have a unique shape. So you have a lot of information to work with.
The answer is to select according to a wide range of criteria, and not rely on a single one. That way, weeds cannot progressively acquire resistance, and need to check all the boxes at once, which makes it highly unlikely that they will pass on their "slightly better" genes.
And of course, the larger the scale you employ a single weeding system at, the more risky it gets. It would be great for supplementing herbicide (while lowering doses) at first, for instance.
Examples of this are Rye and Oats.
...that's exactly what CV needs to handle.
I can imagine discriminating species of a hundred leaves in a very high resolution images to be very challenging.
The leaves are 3-dimensional objects can be twisted, tangled, curled up, broken, half rotten, sunburnt...
A slightly more advanced sensor or lighting apparatus wouldn't cost much more, proportionately to the cost of the whole system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's actually the "weed control at scale" developed in conjunction with the tractor.
I'm not a fan of modern conventional agriculture. The abuse done to topsoil is terrible, and we need better systems. But new systems need to keep their eye on the ball and the ball is a John Deere pulling a 40-foot cultivator across a field while the "operator" reads twitter ( or <verb>s Clubhouse ) only looking up to mind the turns.
Everything starts somewhere, but just because your tech has ML and Laserbeams doesn't mean it passes the tool/toy test.
After all, this is what we did with chemical weedkillers.
The incentive is just too great for Bayer, Syngenta, Monsanto, BASF and Corteva (Dow / DuPont) to lobby this technology to oblivion.
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.
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.
Err... that's probably not what you wanted to hear, though.