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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."
I for one, welcome our weed killing friends... As long as we remain friends.
I am going to hunt this thing down and destroy every last ounce of it's evil metal body...
Right after I get up off the couch
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.
This is Monsanto...
weed GROWING robot, or even the weed SMOKING robot..
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
We want more weed, not less. Oh, wait..
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Why has it taken so long for man to make one? Woman worked out how to do it long ago!
When will they learn that the war on drugs is a lost cause?
If you RTFA you will notice that lasers are in fact one of the "weed-removing attachments" they have.
Well we are one step closer to having robot overlords, we are now equipping autonomous robots with flame throwers!
"Man Finally Makes the Weed-Removing Robot"
In other news, Bush announces a major victory in the war on drugs.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
So, in other words, it smokes the weed...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
HortiBot - A Plant Nursing Robot
Doesn't look like they've gone too far yet, but interesting nevertheless.
I think i know how you feel.
www.purevolume.com/martyd
What would be even cooler, would be a weed growing robot. And if they come up with this, I think a fitting name would be Bender.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
It's a good thing that humanity is a virus, not a weed.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Actually, that was Clinton.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"The labor problem will bring this in, when the government gets done with their immigration laws," Jim Schwass said.
I would appear that the farmers expect to have severe labor problems if the federal government succeeds in preventing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from entering the US without documentation. Farmers depend on lots of low-cost seasonal labor to get their harvest picked. Not so much for grains, but for fruits, berries, and vegetables.
Presently, as I understand the situation, thousands of migrant laborers follow the harvest and provide the long, hard bend-pick-stoop labor needed to get the produce off the ground and onto inspection belts and shipping boxes. Most (I believe, and I may be wrong) of these migrant labors are Mexicans and Central Americans living in the USA without immigration papers. This situation has been like this for about 100 years, since the mechanization of farm planting equipment led to much larger harvests. Using low-cost labor has been the only way to harvest the food. And low-cost has come to mean illegal immigrants. These people have been ruthlessly exploited and little had been done to improve their situation until Cesar Chavez energized the United Farm Workers union in the late 1960's. However the massive overpopulation of Mexico has led to the need for Mexico to send millions of their people to the USA. Stoop labor during harvest season has been the main source of employment for these people, so the cycle of exploitation begins anew.
The introduction of high-technology into a field dominated by serf labor clearly upsets the standard order of things. The robotic technology has always been too expensive and the serf labor too cheap for the any high-tech developments in food harvesting. But if the cost of labor goes up (due to effective immigration law enforcement, a really big if ) at the same time that technological costs go down, then this will lead to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers.
Maybe, and not all at once. For the robots cost a lot of money. A migrant worker can pick a lot of food for the cost of the robot at $70,000. And immigration laws are never seriously enforced after a certain period of 'clamping down on illegals', a period which we are going through now. There simply is no other option to getting the food picked. This situation isn't going to change. Expect all the high-technology in farm work to take place in Europe where they don't have the masses of undocumented and untrackable migrant farm workers to pick the food.
In reality, there is a real need for harvest robots. But it is not in harvesting food; it is in harvesting land mines. No one is going to just walk out into a mine field and just pick up the bombs by hand (regardless of how many little plastic 'keys to heaven' the mullahs give them). And do it day in, day out, for very little money. Even if for some insane reason they actually wanted to, they would eventually all get blown up. This is true robot work. The harvest robot manufacturers should get some NGO to finance all their R&D in return for donating thousands of robot units to clear the vast minefields. Unfortunately, there is no one like Princess Diana around anymore to champion this cause. Shit, maybe we could get Paris Hilton to rally the cause. Good luck!
"Take me to your weeder!"
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Look under products and automatic mowers, they have two types an auto mower which can operate 24 hours a day and goes back to it's base station to charge and a solar powered version.
According to the site the auto mower is good for up to 1500 m, while the solar version is good for up to 1200 m.
They both use a safe cutting system and operate similar to grazing animal, in that they wonder around randomly, with sensors to go around any stationary objects.
The parameter of the tended area is marked with a electric loop
So safe and easy, what are you waiting for!
Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. G.B Shaw
I'm going to get shit for this but:
So the Danes finally managed to clone "Mexicans"?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
http://www.hortibot.dk/index.html
The Haughtibot who is fluent "in over six million forms of communication."
SLM
main() {1;}
You may think goats eat anything, but they are actually particularly choosy. Depending on what your weed problem is, they will actually eat the weeds preferentially and keep them under control. They find things like blackberry, etc especially tasty. Very important to keep them out of your garden though, because they also like roses and other flowers.
Of course if your problem is bracken, bring on the Robot. Nothing eats that stuff.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
... what I really want is a robot to scoop dog poop in my yard.
Sarah Connor?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
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.
But in the end, I get by and they either starve or depend on the kindness of strangers. Regardless of how hard that they work. Because the work that they do can't support ten kids in another country. And people will call me cruel and heartless because I allow this starvation to happen.
If we were dealing with millions of feral cats and dogs, then my very liberal friends would have no problem taking active steps to control their reproduction patterns. But we're dealing with humans, and the situation is different. It's a subject that no one will talk about. But if and when a 'die-off' occurs, the best that the good people will say if they say anything at all about the subject, is that it was the result of a 'disfunctional culture'. Followed by an embarrassed silence, and a quick change of subject to the new wine at Trader Joe's.
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 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.
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.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
is what grandkids are for. At least, that's what my grandparents told us.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.