Whether you're a large-scale farmer, or a hobby gardener struggling with vegetable garden tomatoes, weeds are an incredible nuisance. The startup Carbon Robotics he came up with an autonomous machine that is a Terminator to annoying weeds. With a combination of machine vision and high-powered laser it kills thousands and thousands per hour.
Advances in robotics have opened up some exciting possibilities in the field of weed control. Traditional solutions involve intensive manual labor or the use of expensive and environmentally harmful chemicals. By equipping machines with the equipment and know-how to look for invasive and troublesome weeds, much of this process could be automated, leaving crops healthy and farmers with more money and time on their hands.
Autonomous Weeder: Relentless with weeds
For its solution, Carbon Robotics built a 4.300-kilo (9.500-pound) four-wheeled robot. It uses GPS and computer vision to move through crops looking for weeds. It has an onboard supercomputer and high-resolution cameras to identify unwanted plants, and eight 150W lasers that operate simultaneously to destroy them with thermal energy. It has an insane speed: it kills 100.000 per hour.
The machine is completely autonomous. It can operate around the clock, covering 24 to 24 acres (15 to 20 hectares) a day, while its lasers leave the surrounding soil untouched to preserve its microbiology. The company describes its autonomous robot as a cost-effective solution. Is it worth believing? If it's as they say it would be a good opportunity to improve yields, especially for organic farmers and those who adopt regenerative farming practices to ensure the long-term health of their soil.
Precision agriculture and robotics: an infallible combination
“Artificial intelligence and deep learning technology are creating efficiencies in a variety of industries. We are excited to apply it to agriculture,” he says Paul Mikesell, CEO and founder of Carbon Robotics. “Farmers, and others in the global food supply chain, are innovating now more than ever to feed the world. Our goal at Carbon Robotics is to create tools that tackle their most challenging problems. One of the most nefarious is the management and elimination of invasive weeds.”
Carbon Robotics has been developing and testing its weeding robots since 2018 with the help of farmers. It has already sold out its 2021 models, opening pre-orders for the 2022 line.
Weeds are forewarned.
Source: Carbon Robotics
