Man Finally Makes the Weed-Removing Robot

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the Ludington Daily News, Michigan, Danish agricultural engineers have built a robot to help farmers with weeds. The Hortibot is about 3-foot-by-3-foot, is self-propelled, and uses global positioning system (GPS). It can recognize 25 different kinds of weeds and eliminate them by using its weed-removing attachments. It's also very environmentally friendly because it can reduce herbicide usage by 75 percent. But so far, it's only a prototype and the Danish engineers need to find a manufacturer for distribution."

Comments

What does this thing look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just curious as to how it works. Anyone have pictures?

They say it identifies 25 types of weeds but at what accuracy? I would think accuracy is more important than total number of detectable weeds. If it misidentified your crop as weed you might lose a lot. Imagine coming home one day and it has pulled out or burned your entire crop and it just sits there with a grin.

Hello, We'd Like to Buy You Out

[g8orade]

This is Monsanto...

This is great, but

[cfvgcfvg]

We want more weed, not less. Oh, wait..

Pfff

[LuSiDe]

All 'funny' responses here, and then some cannabis jokes. Legalize cannabis and grow up. Then such childish jokes aren't funny anymore...

It seems nobody addresses the questionable assumption that weeds are somehow 'bad'. Nature lives in harmony without us humans quite well (arguably we rather disrupt the harmony), and there is a reason weeds grow near crops. Hint: the reason is not to be exterminated by man-made robots. Weeds actually often replenish the soil! For those interested, I can name several examples (by Latin name; I don't know English ones) which do this. Some weeds which contain flowers, such as Taraxacum officinale, are besides that good for our bee population. Many weeds also have medicinal properties. In other words: weeds are not 'bad' or 'evil'; they're herbs which are often medicinal. But besides that, they also replenish the soil.

Herbicides do the exact opposite to the soil! Given our soils are in quite bad conditions, we need less herbicides (this thing does that), not necesarily less weeds (this thing exterminates them). Organic farming, IF applied correct, is better for the soil than robots like this. The robots too, lie on a faulty assumption, just like shit like round-up.

Besides all that, the definition of 'weed' is ignorant as it is too much from a human viewpoint; not from a nature viewpoint. Once humanity is able to put itself in nature's shoe (perhaps after a few cataclysms?) this may improve, I presume.

Re:The liberal dilemma

[Rakishi]

Either way it sucks for them, and history will not be kind to us for forcing them into having to choose between really bad options while we, for the most part, live well. Or it may look well upon us. Fast change usually brings about disaster.

But I'm beginning to wonder if the reason that our neighbors live so poorly is not due to a 'disfunctional' culture. The migrants that I've met or have read interviews with often have many more children that they could ever hope to provide minimum subsistence for. They think that I'm weird because I have no children, and I can't believe that they don't see anything unusual about having ten children and a sub-minimum wage job as an illegal immigrant 2000 miles away from their family. It's a cultural problem basically, they were born into a culture that is based on the view that there is high child morality. Having 6 kids isn't a problem if only 2 live to breed but it is if all 6 do. With time this will probably change but culture determines a lot of things and changes slowly. It's also another reason for why fast change to "do the right thing" can backfire. Africa had a stable population before things like modern medicine were imported, almost overnight, and then it grew six fold in under a century. The west has had time to deal with all these changes, more or less, but the rest of the world in many ways hasn't.

I fear something entirely different coming from all this mechanization. If all the menial jobs are removed what will the people who aren't suited for any other work do? Will be, as in many science fiction stories, just pump them full of happy drugs and sit them all in front of TVs?

It doesn't work

[CarpetShark]

I'm just curious as to how it works.

It works badly/not at all. Any horticulturalist will tell you that weeds are just flowers no one likes. Try teaching that distinction to today's robots.

Re:Jokes are cool, But let's talk about farm robot

[Paulrothrock]

Notice first that this is being developed in Germany, not the US. The idea of using computerization on farms is nothing new in Europe.

When I toured Europe I stayed with a family who ran a chicken farm. The father had developed a way to harvest the eggs and feed the chickens all on his own using computerization and robotics. He says his biggest labor expense is going in and cleaning out the dead chickens about once a week. Purdue gave him an award for developing this system, and it's being used all across Europe.

His attempts to market this to farmers in the United States, however, were thwarted by the low cost of labor. He told me "Why would someone spend $150,000 on a system like mine when they can just hire some Mexicans?" It was hard to argue with that logic.

So this will be huge for European farmers who, because of the lack of cheap labor and the strict laws regulating pay and hours, require labor saving devices such as this robot. A $70,000 robot that's capable of weeding a whole field on its own would be amazingly useful to European farmers, especially since it would put them one more step closer to certifying their crops as organic, thus allowing them to charge more for their produce.

Not only that, it would allow European and American farmers to compete against farmers in the third world without subsidies, meaning a better standard of living for all involved.

Re:The liberal dilemma

[MightyYar]

It's a cultural problem basically, they were born into a culture that is based on the view that there is high child morality. It's only indirectly related to child mortality. You have a lot of kids because they are your retirement plan. When you are too old to work, and you are too poor to save money, and the government doesn't provide anything like Social Security - then your only recourse is to have a lot of kids so that someone will take care of you. Having more kids increases the odds that one or more of them will live longer than you and have the means to take care of you.

I fear something entirely different coming from all this mechanization. Don't sweat it too much - we've been progressing technologically as an astonishing rate for about 200 years or so now, and all the menial jobs haven't vanished yet... hell, the poorest people in the world are still subsistence farmers - same as a thousand years prior. Freeing up people from menial labor will on balance bring good things - you can do all sorts of things with people once the basic need for food has been met. Most importantly, getting people out of that impoverished lifestyle will make them feel more secure, and secure people usually don't have a gazillion children.