
Robot gets rid of weeds automatically and without herbicides - scmoore
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/bosch-deepfield-robotics-weed-control
======
jqm
This is cool but I have to disagree with this phrase from the article....
"Given the scale of farming today, treating weeds chemically is really the
only practical way for humans to keep them under control".

It's the easiest way to keep weeds under control but not the only practical
way. (Source: I worked for the weed science department (yes, they had one at
my school) while at university.)

Here are some other methods for reducing weeds:

1) Before planting, till and water the field causing weeds to germinate. Then
harrow the field killing all the weeds. Do this multiple times if needed.

2) Good old fashioned cultivation as was done before the herbicide period.
(The article on the robot was posted a few days ago and in response I posted
the below... it has a lot of pictured of weed control devices which may be
interesting to someone working on robotic weed
control....[https://archive.org/stream/SteelInTheField/Steel%20in%20the%...](https://archive.org/stream/SteelInTheField/Steel%20in%20the%20Field#page/n0/mode/2up))

3) Crop spacing. Space crops so they out-compete the weeds (this is already
usually done).

4) Keep fields clean. Keep the ditch-rows clean. Don't let weeds go to seed.
After a period of time the bank of weed seeds in the soil is reduced and there
are less weeds to control

I know herbicides are faster and cheaper (if we don't consider externalized
costs). But they aren't the only "practical" way to eliminate weeds. It does
take good management and more effort to eliminate or reduce herbicide use
though. I personally think it's very worth it. Oh, and I'm excited about
robotics. I don't know about this device, but I do think field robotics is the
future.

~~~
jqm
There is another approach to weed control. Don't do anything. Let weeds come
up if they want to.

I remember a crusty old guy in Florida showing me his watermelon field that
was full of weeds. I said something about it and he said the weeds actually
shaded the watermelons keeping them from sunburning and he had no intention of
removing them. I don't know if this is necessarily true or if he just didn't
feel like doing anything about it but apparently he didn't think the weeds
were causing economic harm and there were a lot of watermelons in spite of the
weeds.

~~~
arjie
Funny. Masanobu Fukuoka in _One Straw Revolution_ argues for a similar
approach in orchard maintenance, if I recall correctly: allowing all sorts of
plants to grow below the trees and provide ground cover.

~~~
garrettgrimsley
When growing plants such as carrots, as mentioned in the parent article, the
crops are competing with the weeds for space, sunlight, and nutrients. In the
orchard this is not an issue, and the ground cover can be beneficial to the
crop.

~~~
jqm
In carrots (which are densely planted like four rows to a bed) weeds sometimes
do come up in the bed between plants. They usually aren't many because the
carrot tops get so dense they smother most weeds out. You can't cultivate
those weeds with a tractor (without destroying the carrots) and I don't think
they have a roundup resistant carrot. So it's people walking the rows with
hoes from what I've seen, or some other herbicide carrots are immune too. The
device in the article might be especially good for situations like this.

------
aidos
I have countless weeks / months experience in dealing with manual weed
removal. At times when I was younger I spent 14+ hours a day out in the field
destroying weeds with a hand hoe.

One of the main crops I was doing it for was squash. The squash plant is
pretty broad and the hand hoe allowed you to get close in under the plant.
That's something this technique couldn't handle.

As someone working on minimum wage, I could get through a pretty large area in
a day. Sometimes there would half a dozen of us in a gang. I'm not sure how
much a device like this would eventually cost but I suspect for the same money
you could buy a lot of minimum wage manual labour.

Either way, cool prototype!

~~~
fanquake
There's a research project being done on the viability of hand picking radish
plants out of wheat and lupin crops on broadacre farms here in Western
Australia. Some farmers already do it, but once the results come out, I'm
wondering home many more will start.

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discreteevent
The architecture of the ROS system is worth looking at if you haven't seen it.
Everything has a URL and processes communicate using YAML messages by
publishing or osubscribing to topics. (Its very simple but a bit more
liberating than REST!)

[http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingNodes](http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingNodes)

[http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingTopics](http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingTopics)

[http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingServicesParam...](http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingServicesParams)

~~~
Qworg
ROS is being rewritten right now - 2.0 alpha is out.

[http://design.ros2.org](http://design.ros2.org)
[https://github.com/ros2/ros2](https://github.com/ros2/ros2)

------
Havoc
I don't see it detecting any actual weeds? The detection is just targets and
the demonstration of punching the weeds is stationary. Which leaves out the
key challenge - distinguishing between weed & crop.

~~~
toyg
I agree, but to be fair, you could even skip that and just have a remote pilot
looking at the rolling video feed and clicking on targets. It still beats
having people actually walking under the sun and ruining their backs to pull
out weed, or blanketing with herbicide.

I'm not so sure punching is a great solution though. Weed is incredibly good
at reforming from very very small bits left standing.

~~~
InclinedPlane
_beats_ ... I hope that was intentional.

Seriously though, you're right, even if it requires a human in the loop it's
still a huge benefit. Farms could even use remote workers to do the
identification.

~~~
Splines
This seems like the easiest way to get it working now. In fact, you could do
the inverse at some point in the crop cycle - get workers/robots to identify
the viable crops, and from that point on stamp everything else remotely plant-
like out.

------
jhallenworld
Parts of my family are in the bedding plant / greenhouse business. One cool
technology is the transplanting machine. This transfers seedlings from "plug
trays" to "flats" and replaces an assembly line of ladies doing this work.
Here is one design:

[http://www.hamilton-design.co.uk/transplanter.html](http://www.hamilton-
design.co.uk/transplanter.html)

The ones they actually used were the "Harrison Transplanter".. could not find
a video, but here is one
[http://bid.sheridanauctionservice.com/images/lot/3471/347193...](http://bid.sheridanauctionservice.com/images/lot/3471/3471937_0.jpg?1439472444)

Harrison is neighbor of ours who worked at Brookhaven National Labs but then
became an entrepreneur. He sold a bunch of them.

------
XorNot
This is the kind of thing where robotics is really exciting. It does an end
run around every problem with pesticide use by taking it out of the equation
entirely.

------
dsfyu404ed
Cool prototype.

...now make one that mounts on a front 3pt hitch and you might actually sell
one.

No need for a special robot when a different piece of equipment with its own
power source has to go down the field anyway

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Getting rid of weeds will be a continuous task. Farmers don't want to run
tractors down rows any more than they have to, nor will they want to run a
full sized tractor full-time.

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analog31
I was amused by "A Bosch Start-Up" on the side of the machine. Now everything
is a start-up.

~~~
wpietri
I was just at the Lean Startup conference, and a lot of the headline speakers
were from big companies like GE and Intuit. A large portion of the audience
was from names I recognized as well. Being a startup is immensely fashionable.

If large companies can figure out how to house innovation, it would solve some
major problems that they have. But our current model of management is
basically inimical to true innovation, so personally I'm skeptical.

~~~
Terr_
Yeah, the "start-up" label is subject to cargo-culting.

------
aaron695
It's a good example of how play in the future will also go the way of jobs.

Why garden when your neighbors will have amazing gardens cheaply designed and
looked after by robots.

And it'll be smart, it'll know exactly how many weeds to leave so it doesn't
look to perfect, exactly when to plant and pollinate, order things online when
needed.

~~~
icelancer
The journey is as much fun as the end product. Usually moreso in these cases.

~~~
aaron695
This is the problem, robots are killing the journey.

To take your point literally

Like jobs, at first it's great, highways, planes, easy to access information
open up the world to everyone.

But it'll get to the stage where it's too easy. Adventures are getting harder
to have. You no longer find that amazing restaurants, you yelp them and book
months in advance.

In the future when you're chatting to someone about visiting county X and you
realise they have only been there virtually it'll perhaps devalue your own
journey, then perhaps you'll get what I mean.

~~~
Dylan16807
You know people still walk right?

------
josscrowcroft
That's brilliant.

What about using a laser to destroy the weeds?

~~~
fchollet
I suspect this would result in rather superficial weed destruction, since the
roots underground would be unharmed and would cause the weed to regrow a few
days later. Unrooting the weeds definitely sounds more reliable to me.

~~~
jimmar
> Unrooting the weeds definitely sounds more reliable to me.

The robot in the article just pushed the weed underground a few inches. I
imagine that some weeds would just pop back after a week, and that the robot
would just punch them down again.

~~~
fanquake
So you now you have to run your fleet of robot weeders over the field twice?
That seems like a waste of time and $ when you could achieve the desired
result in a single pass. every extra pass is also more soil compaction.

~~~
rcthompson
Pushing the weeds below the surface is probably less disruptive to the
surrounding crops than tearing out the roots. And since you have to run the
machine constantly anyway to prevent new weeds from establishing themselves,
just poking them down repeatedly will eventually starve them of sunlight and
kill them, or at least prevent them from ever growing large enough to cause a
problem.

------
zo1
So, HN, this looks like _really_ fun and interesting stuff to work on. Any
ideas on how a normal developer with a CS background can get into something
like this? Either working for this company, or one like it... Or hobby
projects that are within a normal person's budget.

Let me know if I should elaborate further and make an Ask HN out of this?

~~~
bglazer
No idea how to get into this on the company side. Apparently hey use Robotics
Operating System (ROS) quite extensively, so you could learn about that
([http://www.ros.org/](http://www.ros.org/))

On the hobby side, check out farmbot [http://farmbot.io/](http://farmbot.io/)

------
stretchwithme
I think eventually farming will be completely robotic and we'll have farm on
our roofs. Household waste will be processed and used for it. Robots will
harvest crops for us and even get them to market if we aren't around to eat
them, probably selling to people in the neighborhood.

------
barney54
How many years until a robot like this will cut your grass, weed the lawn, and
weed your flowerbeds?

~~~
kbenson
How many years until we be stuck with this archaic and elitist concept of a
lawn?

Grass where it serves some benefit such as a backyard at least serves a
purpose. Front lawns in locations where they are ornamental are a blight.

~~~
whoiskevin
For as long as I live where a lawn does not require a sprinkler. Think outside
the box.

~~~
kbenson
So _we_ are all stuck with an outdated _concept_ that originated from
aristocratic landowners who wanted to show how much money they had by devoting
a portion of their estate to not growing crops and just being manicured
because _you_ can do it without watering?

How very kind of you to epitomize the "get off my lawn" meme, but I'm not on
your lawn. I'm not telling you to get rid of your lawn, but the concept as it
exists now and it's popularization is at best wasteful, and in some cases
actively causes problems with water availability in some areas. Some reform in
the popularized concept of a front lawn would be beneficial to everyone.

~~~
spdionis
Lawns look nice. Sounds like a good enough reason to keep them. We are not
THAT overpopulated.

~~~
brc
They also stop erosion, provide habitat for insects and animals and are
pleasing to walk on.

I get having a lawn in a desert is a poor use of water, but for many houses
and recreational areas, it's an excellent way to cover ground.

~~~
kbenson
I have no problem with lawns that are used, but what percentage of front lawns
do you think get any use? I'm full in support of rear lawns or front lawns
that are used, but as a status symbol I think they are wasteful of land,
resources and time. Parks are an excellent place for a grass, and I'm not
complaining about those either.

------
n00b101
Looking at the video, they seem to be using a Microsoft Kinect sensor.

