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AI-Enhanced Weed-Killing Robots Frighten Pesticide Industry (reuters.com)
Rick Schumann writes:
A Swiss company called ecoRobotix is betting the agricultural industry will be willing to welcome their solar-powered weed-killing autonomous robot, in an effort to reduce the use of herbicides by up to a factor of 20 and perhaps even eliminate the need for herbicide-resistant GMO crops entirely.
The 'see-and-spray' robot goes from plant to plant, visually differentiating the actual crops and weeds, and squirting the weeds selectively and precisely with weed killer, as opposed to the current technique of using large quantities of weed killer like Monsantos' Roundup to spray entire crops.
Weeds are already becoming resistant to such glyphosate-based herbicides after "more than 20 years of near-ubiquitous use," reports Reuters. (The head of one pesticide company's science division concedes that "That was probably a once-in-a-lifetime product.") But AI-based precision spraying "could mean established herbicides whose effect has worn off on some weeds could be used successfully in more potent, targeted doses."
Meanwhile, another Silicon Valley startup has built a machine using on-board cameras to distinguish weeds from crops -- and was recently acquired by the John Deere tractor company. Reuters calls these companies the "new breed of AI weeders that investors say could disrupt the $100 billion pesticides and seeds industry."
The original submission asks: Should we welcome our weed-killing robotic overlords?
The 'see-and-spray' robot goes from plant to plant, visually differentiating the actual crops and weeds, and squirting the weeds selectively and precisely with weed killer, as opposed to the current technique of using large quantities of weed killer like Monsantos' Roundup to spray entire crops.
Weeds are already becoming resistant to such glyphosate-based herbicides after "more than 20 years of near-ubiquitous use," reports Reuters. (The head of one pesticide company's science division concedes that "That was probably a once-in-a-lifetime product.") But AI-based precision spraying "could mean established herbicides whose effect has worn off on some weeds could be used successfully in more potent, targeted doses."
Meanwhile, another Silicon Valley startup has built a machine using on-board cameras to distinguish weeds from crops -- and was recently acquired by the John Deere tractor company. Reuters calls these companies the "new breed of AI weeders that investors say could disrupt the $100 billion pesticides and seeds industry."
The original submission asks: Should we welcome our weed-killing robotic overlords?
Seems like it wouldn't take much more mechanical engineering know how to pull them out by the roots. I have yet to hear of a weed that can resist being pulled out of the ground and tossed into the compost bin.
Some weeds break at the soil line and the roots regrow, you say? It's a robot, run it again in a month or two. Extra added bonus, this time you get all those young whippersnapper weeds that were but tis a seed last time the robot came by.
Seriously, what's wrong with just using their natural enemies? If necessary, help them along a bit. Nature likes balancing anyway.
Oh wait, it's about making money for money's sake. Not anything with an actual point to it.
A legitimately useful application of algorithms? ;) Naturally it's not in America where we only consider agorithms to be tools for personal profit or power or to enable laziness or sci-fi delusions. Big agriculture in America would never go for this if it means the end of GMOs. Screw our health or the planet if profit is at stake.
Get some goats, penned them in an area for a day, and they will eat all the weeds that they can find.
I live in a suburban area, and overuse of weed-killer is rampant. I used to see bugs when I was growing up... now it's a rare thing. These pesticides are getting in our food, our water, disrupting the food chain... Targeted weed killers (possibly the next step could be targeted radiation?) could cut way back on this, I'm hopeful.
This is an awesome job for AI robots. Either:
1. It replaces hard-on-the-body manual labor (long hours bent over, sun & sunburn & skin cancer, etc) by using a robot to pull weeds.
2. It delivers targeted doses of herbicides, hopefully reducing the enormous amount of Glyphosate(*) currently used AND reducing Monstanto's ridiculous amount of control over the farm industry.
* - Over 90% of all glyphosate produced and used EVER has been in the past 20 years. 70% in just the last 10. Food today is NOT the same as it was in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Do you trust Monsanto to proactively limit the amount of Roundup you consume?
https://www.ecowatch.com/monsa...
have a headline like "see the new gadget that terrifies the pesticide industry", mention magnets maybe and the investment opportunity. click bait on slashdot
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Just apply very concentrated doses of fertilizer and other "good" soil chemicals - enough to poison the weeds when applied directly, but good for the crop when diluted by irrigation or rain.
get how people can Of *BSD aaswipes 4.1BSD product, and abroad for
weed killer != pesticide. Weed killer is designed to kill plants with a preference hopefully for weeds. Pesticide is designed to kill bugs. The dominant weed killers in the city are concrete and asphalt.
At one point we had the delusion that weed killers don't have an effect on humans. We've since found that our bodies do often have responses. For example, those based on plant estrogens have caused early puberty in some females - as early as toddler ages in cases where they got really stupid and put plant estrogens in a shampoo.
I wonder when will weeds starts imitating the look of crops or maybe grew some patches/patterns that triggers the false positive of the image recognition algorithm and avoid being picked up by the robot... Sounds scary.
can we train it to weed out politicians ?
Weed detected. Kill squishy human. Exterminate. Robots can be reprogrammed to kill you and your family by the Illuminati.
Robotics can make sense in agriculture, but as every farmer will tell you, farming is really about economics: Getting good returns of investment on a weeding robot, given how relatively cheap pesticides are, is going to be tricky given regular year's crop prices.
The last time we had a boom in agricultural tech had nothing to do with the tech getting better, and a lot with a terrible drought in the midwest that made prices skyrocket. When corn pays $8 per bushel, instead of $3, suddenly everyone was willing to buy tech. Then prices drop again, nobody wants to keep buying, and many people that bought into the tech when they expected $8 forever just went bankrupt.
Eventually we'll have cheap enough robots that will also handle pests, and might even isolate or destroy diseased plants, lowering our chemical uses while still having great yields, but in agriculture, it's the economics that is stopping a tech boom, as aiming for the top of the technology chain, including the best seeds, is quite the gamble given what weather can do to your operation.
The article seems to suggest that the plan is to use current herbicides in greater concentrations to overcome resistance. But, surely the entire point of the current herbicides is that they fiendishly designed to be poisonous to weeds but not to crops. Once you have a gadget which only sprays the weeds, you can use a less specific chemical which just kills any plant it is sprayed on and which presumably the weeds haven't yet had a need to develop resistance to. It also seems to me that a weedkiller which kills any plant can attack much more fundamental aspects of plant biochemistry and therefore be harder to develop resistance to.
I already have weedkillers in my shed which basically say on the label "Kills all plants, only spray this on your weeds" and what they seem to be proposing is essentially the huge automated equivalent of me roaming my garden and carefully spraying any weeds I find.
Note that this invalidates most of the early court rulings in favor of Monsanto, which were made under Monsanto's assurance that plants could not develop resistance. And thus any crop which could survive spraying with Round-Up must be from stolen Monsanto seed. This shifted the burden of proof in Monsanto's favor. The farmer had to prove they were innocent and the seed got on their land accidentally, instead of Monsanto proving they were guilty because the farmer planted it deliberately.
Vinegar in a small sprayer does fine. No pesticides required.
Automating stoop labor is good.
Image recognition is getting cheaper: see 'YOLOv3' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPU2HistivI) for what I mean.
~childo
The fine print from thier website âoeWe recommend using the machine after an initial standard application of herbicide, in order to replace subsequent applications and thus save an important amount of herbicide. â
This is the kind of research that should be subsidized because of the potential health benefits of reducing herbicides in our food.
Market forces alone will not entirely "care" because they are weighing costs and profits, not long term consumer health.
True, it may make things easier for organic farmers, but if weed bots get cheap enough for regular crops, then either they are cheaper than herbicides, or herbicides can be banned because weed-pulling robots would a sufficient alternative.
Table-ized A.I.
That's funny. What's worse is that the "organic" label in no way means "no pesticides". It means they used what they call "organic pesticides", which are pesticides that are chemically similar to some of nature's more potent toxins. What's not allowed on organic produce are the newer, more targeted pesticides which designed to be effective against insects but harmless to people. Instead, organic pesticides are based on the chemistry of toxic plants.
It's like using belladonna (deadly nightshade) to treat ulcers. It works if you happen to get a belladonna plant with just the right concentration of hyoscyamine, and you take just the right amount, but it's a hell of a lot safer and more effective to use modern compounds like amoxicillin or Prilosec.
In one recent USDA study, lettuce marketed as organic contained, on average, ten times the amount of pesticide as lettuce not marked organic. That's because "regular" lettuce can use trace amounts of modern, much more effective, compounds, rather than drowning the lettuce in a toxin that's naturally produced by a bacterium.
The concept of sensor-driven selective application isn't new and there are implements out there that perform selective application of herbicides and fertilisers already. Have been for years.
My cousin runs a decent-sized mixed cropping/grazing operation and invested into precision ag. It's impressive stuff - his paddocks have had their soil mapped down to a granularity of every square metre and his airseeder uses that data to dynamically alter the seeding rate and application of fertiliser.
The tractor is semi-autonomous with GPS-guided auto steering so it always drives in the same tracks to avoid compacting the soil (it's a no-till farm) His spraying boom has sensors on each nozzle so that it only sprays weeds.
He's put a few million into all that equipment - it's very expensive stuff as it is built to a very high quality and to last years, but it is paying for itself by slashing inputs and helping to boost yields.
AI-Enhanced Headline Writing Robots Frighten Tech-Blog Editors
A Swiss company called headRobotix is betting the tech-blog industry will be willing to welcome their solar-powered headline-writing autonomous robot, in an effort to reduce the use of lame editors by up to a factor of 20 and perhaps even eliminate the need for clickbait-enhanced headlines entirely.
The 'see-and-write' robot goes from story to story, visually differentiating the actual information and FUD, and writing the headlines selectively and precisely with clickbait killing AI, as opposed to the current technique of using large quantities of snot nosed nitwits to clickbait entire stories.
and instead of pulling the weed it just burns them to the dirt, it might be quicker and the dead weed can just sit there and decompose back in to the soil
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
This disruption couldn't happen to a mode deserving bunch than the likes of Monsanto. The real agri-revolution will happen when everything from in the agricultural production cycle (plow/seed/weed/pick/sort/transport/etc..) is automated. In that world, what will farmers be transformed into?
Organization? You must be joking..
I already have weeder robots on our farm. They eliminate the need to use herbicides and pesticides because not only do they pull the weeds but they also kill rodents and insects that are problems for our crops. I have the versions called D.U.C.K.S. and C.H.I.C.K.E.N.S, - They work great.
Seriously. Properly timed rotations of ducks and chickens through corn, brassicas, tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, sunflowers and other crops do wonders to remove the weeds prior to planting and after the crops have grown to about 12" to 18" in height.
Prior to all of this we use the biorobotic tilling machines called P.I.G.S..
As an added benefit all of these robots excrete organic fertilizers that are specially formulated to make our crops thrive. It's called S.H.I.T.
Finally, at the end of the biorobot's service life rather than repairing them we disassemble them and pack up the drive components to sell as high quality organic meat. What a win-win situation for farmers, consumers and the environment! Of course, pesticide producers are rather P.I.S.S.E.D. but that can be used for fertilizer too as it is high in beneficial nitrogen need by crops.
This means the robot produces 19 times as much herbicide was was used before?
Soon cities will profit selling off the right to rip open landfills with robots and recycle it all.
You read it here first!
Actually, if you had been paying attention you read it here 15 years ago here first. I usually got downmodded saying it was silly to worry about landfills.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Just imagine what the world could be if these great inventions were made Free. But now the DRM tractor company bought it.
Sure they'll come back up, but if there's a pass of this machine every 3 days, it'll eventually kill it.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Opening scene (which I can't find!) from the 1984's "Runaway" with Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons (!) shows tiny robots rolling around a farm picking insects off plants and grinding them up. Very cute. Very Michael Criton.
The pesticide industry will do just fine even with weed killing robots being deployed. There are plenty of other chemicals to make and plenty of other facets of agribusiness they can profit from. Even if sales of roundup permanently went to zero this afternoon the company that makes it would be just fine.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How long will it take the weeds to evolve to look like the crops?
*** On the Internet, no one knows you're using a VIC-20
That's funny. What's worse is that the "organic" label in no way means "no pesticides". It means they used what they call "organic pesticides", which are pesticides that are chemically similar to some of nature's more potent toxins. What's not allowed on organic produce are the newer, more targeted pesticides which designed to be effective against insects but harmless to people. Instead, organic pesticides are based on the chemistry of toxic plants.
Yeah, toxic to bugs. Did you know that mint oil is a neurotoxin to wasps? You're ignoring half of the argument in order to demonize organics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, toxic to bugs. Did you know that mint oil is a neurotoxin to wasps? You're ignoring half of the argument in order to demonize organics.
No, he's not. Some stuff - like mint oil - is mostly just toxic to bugs. Other approved "organic" pesticides - like copper sulphate - are toxic to pretty much every type of animal life. Some approved pesticides, like pyrethrin, are known neurotoxins. While pyrethrin tends to break down relatively quickly some residue still remains on produce, and it certainly poses a far greater risk to farmers themselves than roundup ever could.
Extreme poisons resulted in super plants evolving to beat the poisons... Chemicals pushed insects to evolve...
Robots killing weeds and insects? Imagine how dangerous a plant which can defeat a robot will be? Imagine the robot killing insects!
Perhaps we can get some B-Movie Sci-Fi out of this?
No, he's not. Some stuff - like mint oil - is mostly just toxic to bugs. Other approved "organic" pesticides - like copper sulphate - are toxic to pretty much every type of animal life.
Yes, he is, because he's conflating them all. Which ones are used in which percentages, and which ones are easiest to wash off are both relevant.
When I've done organic gardening, I've used literally nothing which was harmful to humans. Castile soap, neem oil, and baking soda cover the majority of problems. Sometimes I had to bring in some insect predators, but they turned out fine. Not using pesticides which harm beneficial insects means that there are insect predators, and also more birds around to eat bugs. And yields are higher when you don't plant monocultures, and you don't till soil. Finally, most big ag companies require that farmland not be surrounded by wilderness for fear that a deer might shit on some lettuce. Of course, we know that the real problem is when people shit in the fields because they don't have time for a bathroom break, which is what happens on factory farms. It's perfectly safe to use humanure once it's been composted; in a year or less, it becomes perfectly benign soil that is not only safe, but also utterly unrecognizable as feces.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is very good news because, tomatoes which ripe all summer long used to be tasty and sweet as compared to current breeds having no sugar but ripe at the same day, but very convenient for harvesting them.
Robotization of agriculture will create 100% autonomous farms, working without human supervision all year long, unfortunately it will eliminate farmers as a class of citizens once and forever, since the owner of that technology will have no need in human hands and it will rely only on patches of land and standard set of equipment eliminating any humans in work cycle.
It is called FarmBot and the software to run it is on GitHub.
When I've done organic gardening
Yes, and all people who do organic gardening do it with your universal perspective in mind. Who would dare violate your universal experience?
>Did you know that mint oil is a neurotoxin to wasps?
That would be interesting, and relevant if wasps were a pest to important crops, and therefore mint oil could be used to protect the crops from wasps. As you may know, that's not the case.
Well, I suppose it's indirectly relevant if you consider that wasps primarily feed in insects, some of which are crop pests. Therefore using the organic mint oil kills the wasps, which then can't kill the pest insects. In that way, organic mint oil increases the number of pest insects. That doesn't support your narrative, though, so we'll ignore the actual effect and just say it's not relevant.
> When I've done organic gardening ...
When I build electronic circuits, I sometimes use wire wrapped. You'll never find wire-wrapped circuits in any store, so the fact that I use it is completely irrelevant to any discussion about which electronics people buy. When I build model planes at home, I use Dollar Tree foam board, gift cards, and popsicle sticks. You won't find any stores selling planes made of DT foam board, gift cards, and popsicle sticks, so that construction method is irrelevant to what people choose to purchase in stores.
Your garden isn't in the grocery store, so it's completely irrelevant to the discussion of what consumers buy. Commercially produced organic produce uses significantly more toxic chemicals than that not marked organic.
Anything you say about your home garden or wasps is just trying to distract from that simple fact.
Now do the same thing for fire fighting. Have a solar robot stationed and patrolling a given area. When a fire ignition is detected, it sprays water to extinguish the flame at the source.
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FWIW, Roundup (mentioned in TFA) is not typically sprayed in "large quantities", since it's a killer of all vegetation. The only time it's used as a "weed killer" is on specific crops, such as Monsanto's patented "Roundup-ready" soybeans.
Sincerely,
Dr. Pedantic
These robots are being developed because farming has made plants resistant to pesticides. What are we going to do when plants start evolving to be resistant to robots?