https://carbonrobotics.com/laserweeder
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/farming-robot-kills-200000-weeds-hour-lasers
The agricultural world is witnessing a remarkable transformation, driven by groundbreaking technology. Among the most fascinating innovations is a farming robot equipped with lasers that can destroy hundreds of thousands of weeds in mere hours. This high-tech solution is not just a marvel of engineering but a timely response to persistent challenges in farming, from labor shortages to the environmental impact of chemical herbicides.
. . . The robot operates with minimal human intervention, scanning rows of crops using 12 high-resolution cameras that detect weeds in real time. Its onboard AI system processes this information, distinguishing weeds from crops with incredible accuracy. Once a weed is identified, carbon dioxide lasers target and destroy it instantly, leaving the surrounding soil undisturbed. This approach eliminates the need for chemical herbicides, reducing environmental harm while preserving soil health. It also alleviates the physical burden of manual weeding, offering farmers a more efficient alternative.
Beyond its functional benefits, the introduction of robots like the Autonomous Weeder marks a significant shift in the agricultural sector. These machines demonstrate the potential of integrating AI into farming practices, enabling farmers to achieve more with fewer resources. As the capabilities of such robots continue to expand, they are not only solving immediate issues but also setting the stage for a future defined by sustainable and technologically advanced agriculture.
. . . Economically, the LaserWeeder is a sound investment. While the initial cost may seem substantial, its ability to cut weeding expenses by up to 80% means that the machine pays for itself within two to three years. This rapid return on investment, combined with its labor-saving capabilities, makes it a practical choice for farms of all sizes. As more farmers experience its benefits firsthand, the LaserWeeder is solidifying its place as a vital tool for modern agriculture.
(more, including pix and a short video)
When they eventually shrink it down to a scale to be able to cover a domestic garden. There’s going to be a lot of happy gardeners and old people.
Then we need something that hits stink bugs, jap beetles, squash borers, etc.
It identifies weeds using optics, so I don't see why we couldn't teach the lasers to identify pest bugs, too.
How about Liberals? Jus sayin!
Kek! They do have some visual commonalities, so... sure!
The blue hair will help.
Just go thermal and kill anything living on the crops. Wonder if it can ID pedos?
Not ladybugs, they eat the aphids and don’t hurt the plants.
Half of the ladybugs are Asian Lady beetles. The tranny version of the ladybug. They do damage.
Yes, and they emit an awful stink when you squish em.
Who goes around squishing ladybugs and then smelling them??
Skynet?
Sky's the limit! ;)
Wait till they start lasering humans eliminating the need for farmers altogether.
ideally that would be great but the birds and other critters eat them, part of Gods plan. Guess if you have an over abundance it would be great but what I do is put some bird houses by my garden and the birds eat the insects in the garden keeping it clean. They produce a lot of babies and they need to feed them insects. I believe man purposely has been creating an imbalance in nature and that is why we have such a horrible bug issue at times. We all need to go back to holistic gardening and balance nature as God intended plus these new technologies definitely can help. We need to the birds and they need food.
Birds and the bees! We have a ton of bees.
I have plenty of 'weeds' in my veggie patch. Most I leave them to attract the pollinators and condition the soil. I clear the area just before I plant out more vegetables. I like the idea of weeding by laser for farms, golf courses, parks. Ending the use of sprays is a good thing.
Personal nano-drones that zap all the mosquitos around you.
It already has that capability. I saw a video of it (or something similar to this one) in action a couple years ago. I'm not sure why they are no longer advertising its bug killing ability, and the video I saw is strangely missing from web searches.
Mosquitoes
That'd be nice. Thankfully not much of an issue where I'm at in NC.
You don’t have mosquito’s in NC ?
We do. I’ve only lived here 3 years, north of Charlotte, and they are a minor nuisance compared to Northern VA where I’m from.
In our lifetime, we'll see late night commercials for the "Bell and Howell" garden bot. Right after the Billy Mays and Shamwow versions ;-). The technology is advancing at a rapid pace and really cool to see and watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gLOALCvlMI
"Weeds" are not what we need to eliminate. The weeds are earth's natural mechanism to balance out nutrients in the soil. Weeds have strong tendency to sustain, pull minerals deep from underneath and bring them to the surface. They are excellent composting materials when naturally perished depending on the season. Don't go against the nature, but work with the nature to discover wonders and gifts it gives. Most "weeds" are actually either edible as foods or excellent medicines.
I understand the need to remove weeds in mass agriculture to yield profits. But that's the fundamental problem with Big foods. The food grown in such fields are not natural. Mono-culture is not only harmful to the soil but also destroys Eco-system all around it. The earth is meant to express itself by encouraging variety of flora and fauna on its surface. If we just allow it to to what it wants/needs to do, we would thrive along just fine. That's the principle of permaculture, which is a fast growing initiative by many awakened farmers these days.
Robots with AI and lasers on mass scale? What could go wrong? I can't believe all the excited comments on this post! I thought this was a conservative forum.
The excitement is because poison chemicals being sprayed on our FOOD is a bad thing, and this can eliminate much of that.
As for your point about the benefits of weeds: I suspect what needs to happen is to optimize the robot's actions: kill all of only X1 weeds, 20% of of X2 weeds, kill 50% of X3 weeds every other year, and so on. There will be some algorithm that will minimize the harm and maximize the benefits of this method of farming.
Having said that, I believe you are correct that small-scale farming is better for the land, regardless of the care taken, than large-scale factory farming.
Yes, we have to go after pesticide companies for sure. Roundup and Monsanto were already in massive lawsuits and pretty sure, many more are in the queue.
But the mindset programmed into the AI is still very mainstream. I do my own gardening in my backyard, I don't pull out any weeds. I actually eat many of them. In spring my backyard is full of various greens, but are not popular or sold in the markets although they are rich in nutrients and minerals (dandelions, wild lettuce, mallow, lambsquarters, purslane, etc). I know that these help build healthy soil as I observed and I hardly have to water my garden since roots of these weeds hold water and nutrients that help with other formal crops.
Trying to solve one problem, we are introducing myriads of other problems like always. Let the nature be nature.
Yes let nature be nature . I love my lizards, in my yard, I always Call them my little frens as they run around .
Me too! I don't like the rats though... they are just evil.
My yard is full of rats, extra rats because I feed the birds ! I mean it’s bad they run around like it’s a fun zone , my yard is beautiful and well kept and it bums me out because I can’t have a veggie garden , the rats eat everything . Even before the birds there were a lot of rats , im in San Diego and they are canyon rats , we have lots of trails and canyons near beach areas and plenty of rats , cats can’t survive because of the coyotes . So it’s a nightmare .
Get a few cats from the pound that look like rat catchers.
Or hire a ferret guy to snuff out the rats. Its highly effective. There's videos on yt.
The cats venture out of the yard and the coyotes get them . I would get cats but I feel bad because I know they wouldn’t last and the rats would still be here. San Diego has lots of rats and they are big . Most are still alive in the big black rat traps it’s horrible .
Buy a mink, they are great rat killers,and good pets. They will go down their holes and kill them.
Minks really , I will research . Problem is if they wander out of my yard the Coyotes will kill them . Coyotes wander near my house every night . They will jump fences and grab little dogs . Some people put coyote rollers on their fences to prevent this . They cant get in my yard because I made it a fortress. I have cape honey suckle that is atleast 18 to 20 feet tall that wraps around my whole house. Nothing or no one gets in my place accept the rats . Some summers I’ve had them run in to me as I walk through my yard at night, it’s friggin rediculous . Some Neighbors use poison which killed off all the owls and most falcons as they grab the poison rats . I hate traps because mostly they get caught in them and I found them alive caught by a leg or whatever , it’s to traumatizing for me . I open the traps and let them crawl away. I’ve thrown them in Home Depot buckets of water too but again even though I hate rats it’s kind of traumatizing for me To kill animals ( I’m not opposed to hunting however I don’t hunt myself ) . I live in an area near cannons and lots of trees , so rats are a big problem , they are called canyon rats . Snakes help we have a lot of rattle snakes here too .
AI robots to catch rats... that's an idea I can live with, happily!
No kidding . Do you have rats because of the canyons ?
Yeah, like dandelions for example, great for cancer and makes good tea.
Sounds like a new Isaac Asimov book, unless you can use "I, Robot" as an example here!
I agree with you. Whole thing sounds stupid.
I love your comment , so true my fren ! Best thing I’ve read in awhile . I hope you live in a beautiful area in our country !
Thank you fren, I wish I was in a rural area, but no, I am in the city, in the heart of silicon valley.
Oh so you’re in Cali too ?
I agree, they need to not implement this as a free range drone, it needs to have limits, whether a battery that needs to frequently dock, or only works in the confines of a zone that is surrounded by camera's (eyes). Going beyond its boundary it should become blind.
It could be good due to not needing poisons, but precautions must be installed.
Farmer here, don't want to dox myself but I have a relative that also farms and they ran a trial plot this year where they were given an experimental solar powered weeding robot. It failed miserably! It obviously needed more power than some panels could give it because it absolutely couldn't keep up. Also I think it killed most of the crop.
I do think there can be a bright future for automatic weeding machines but they'll need to run on diesel not wind or fairy farts
Amp those fairies up with Taco Bell, and you are looking at a pretty volatile source.
Interesting. I'm not surprised that some efforts at this tech have failed; that's true with most technologies. I'll be interested to see how CarbonRobotics and their competitors are doing over the next few years.
Let cows eat em and we'll eat the cows.
Sub-millimeter precision cows? Do you know how farming works?
You keep the vegetables, I'd rather have the cows.
That tech has been testing for a while. Glad to see it’s gaining some recognition
That is a lot of unskilled labor being replaced by robots. I don't think they are the type to learn to code. What will they do next? Desperate men do desperate acts.
go back to mexico probably
I would rather we practice permaculture, polyculture, silvopasture and regenerative agriculture. Weeds are gods answer to our mismanagement.
Yes
I 🧡 this. lots of cancer in the midwest, from all the Roundup. Of course you could never tell anyone that...
glad it's finally being exposed.
They also have a more conventional system that optical scans and sprays only the weeds.
There's probably a robot that does that with humans
plot twist
The farms that grow the plants for the essential oils I utilize use sheep in certain fields to help with weeds. They also use the distilled oils that don’t pass their tests for use back into the fields as natural pest management. It’s actually easy to not poison the earth if you choose not to be evil.
Professor Ted warned us about this. Eventually people will be useless eaters. Only the Amish will last—at least until Elon’s robots get them.
Trump should subsidize this technology so lefties start drinking glyphosate in protest.
No more roundup
Or GMO crap
Where can I get one of these? 😄
Whelp, guess we won't be needing so many brown foreigners to work the fields. Y'all can go back now! Thanks.
AI robots with lasers programmed to kill. What could go wrong?
It should be tooled to work with weeds and insects. Good insects stay, bad go ZZZAP. Imagine eliminating the need for pesticides entirely. Taste the Laser!
I hope you're right, and with the March of Technology [TM], why wouldn't you be?
How long before all the environmentalists start reeeeing about how many CO2 laser pulses are equivalent to cow farts and will destroy the ozone layer? They want to get rid of farms anyway - why not exaggerate? I mean CO2 lasers can have nitrogen, helium, and hydrogen and or xenon. I'm sure the loons can make that sound scary enough to protest.
Carbon dioxide?!?!
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.............
😄
200,000 / hour
3,333 / minute
55 / second
Weedbot go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Whatever you do, DO NOT let John Deer get ahold of this technology.
I want the hand held version for my own garden!
Good luck. Something similar without ai has been out for years. Its high voltage requirements have wrapped it up in safety studies for years.
That's cool! The scope and breadth that robotics is expanding into a great.
I want a home version for my back yard...
Remember the libs tring to insist that illegal immigration is needed for food production (of course *they *would like slave wages, awful)... Robots with decent AI will be replacing so many jobs in this sector, it's such a non-issue.
Nice! So much for AI being always bad.
It is!!! I read the title as "Farming Robot kill 200,000..." My mind went to people, then I read the rest.
Same
Not just any people. The AI specifically targets "weeds" -- bad "plants". Let's go!
Now that's an AI I can "root" for!
Cue government to tax or ban Carbon Dioxide lasers because muh "climate change".
Is there a link?
It finally occurred to me why you might not be seeing the links; see if this solves the problem --
carbonrobotics DOT com/laserweeder
zerohedge DOT com/technology/farming-robot-kills-200000-weeds-hour-lasers
I don't understand why you're asking; there are two -- one to a company that makes these things and one to a Zerohedge article on the topic -- right at the top of the post.
In case they aren't showing up for you, here they are again:
https://carbonrobotics.com/laserweeder
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/farming-robot-kills-200000-weeds-hour-lasers
Yea... sorry, this has been happening a lot on this platform. Comments allude to having watched a link but the post doesn't link to it for me. It just reloads the post. Weird.
We need these at polling locations.
Now make it chase illegal workers too.
Somebody get that robot to "the farm" ASAP!
also great for pest control
Damn, I've hoed a lot of weeds. Got 25cents an hour.