
Roomba Inventor Joe Jones on His New Weed-Killing Robot - sohkamyung
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/roomba-inventor-joe-jones-on-weed-killing-robot
======
djb_hackernews
As a hobby gardener and wannabe roboticist I've thought a lot about this
problem. Before I continue I love this thing and am seriously thinking about
getting one.

However, a concern that I'm sure they've thought a lot about is in it's
technique. I really only care about making sure there are no weeds within,
say, 8 inches of my plants (or put another way, my level of concern about a
weed is proportional to it's distance from my vegetable or flower plant). This
looks like it will weed everything _except_ the 8 inches around the plant.
Never mind things like cucumbers that spread out on the ground and have
important bits that are short and can't be contained by the wire protectors.
Still, an exciting place to start.

~~~
mikepurvis
I do raised beds as well, so I have the same concern. But from my point of
view the larger issue is that I'm almost never _only_ weeding. Like, it's just
not that big of a job.

But more importantly, time spent "in the garden" includes a lot of inspection
and minor adjustments to all kinds of things— move plants on a trellis,
pinching suckers off the tomatoes, clipping blighted leaves off of plants,
ensuring flowers are getting fertilized, monitoring fruit growth, etc.

All of this stuff is an essential part of being in tune with what's going on
out there, and I'm not sure that having a robot do one small piece of it is
beneficial. Basically, this product doesn't really look like it was built by a
gardener— it looks like it was someone who had a solution they wanted to apply
elsewhere, and spent 15 minutes watching a gardener at work, without really
understanding what they were doing.

~~~
visarga
Watering would be a nice function as well. Many people don't want to bother
with water pipes, so a bot that takes care of watering would be useful.

~~~
mikepurvis
In my opinion, that suffers from the same fundamental issue that it's covering
a small portion of the visible work that a gardener is doing, but isn't
accounting for all the observation and tweaks.

Basically I'm just not sure it's realistic to pitch this product to someone
who wants to have an outdoor garden but spend little to no time actually
tending it. I feel this kind of user might be better served by something like
Aerogarden.

In any case, it's a much harder problem because watering even a small garden
takes a _lot_ of water, so for it to be practical, you either need a robot
with a huge (and very heavy) reservoir, or a base station at which it can fill
up (which would almost certainly require leaving the garden bed itself,
massively complicating the whole system).

~~~
emodendroket
Maybe you could attach a garden hose.

~~~
kogepathic
_> Maybe you could attach a garden hose._

It would have to be a much stronger robot to haul around a garden hose. Those
things can easily weigh several kilograms when they're full of water, not to
mention they can get caught on obstructions rather easily.

~~~
emodendroket
Have you used one of these robot vacuum cleaners? I sometimes think they spend
more time getting caught on obstructions than vacuuming. :)

~~~
kpil
There's always a sock waiting to be stuck on somewhere...

But I don't get it why they won't make the robot reverse a short bit and try
to go around instead of just rolling over and die.

That would solve 99% of the situations I have rescued my old Roomba and
current Neato from. It's very seldom they actually got something entangled in
their brushes.

~~~
emodendroket
I think the concern is probably causing damage. In my home it's usually wires
that are a problem.

~~~
kpil
It already is damaging things as it is. The Neato have peeled a USB cable and
an audio cable. It also have chewed on a few laptop charger cables but they
seems to be tougher so no damage. Hopefully it won't peel something that could
be dangerous.

I doubt it could be that hard to detect an unusually low rotation speed. Now
it seems to chug until it really stalls. Instead it should stop the brushes
immediately and retreat, then retry with just the fan running.

------
Gibbon1
I expect that one thing that will come out of deep learning is mechanical
weeding for industrial level agriculture. Instead of spraying crops with
herbicide, mechanically remove weeds. Bonus is agricultural machinery tends to
be high capital cost anyways, which allows for a lot more processing power and
sensors than a garden robot.

~~~
tda
I really hope we get there soon. Not only could this eliminate usage of
herbicides, but many smaller autonomous robots vs one really big John Deere
could also remove the need for monocultures. And that would really be a major
improvement for both crop yields and the environment

~~~
puranjay
As someone who lives in a country where 55% of the population is involved in
agriculture, it sounds more terrifying than wonderful.

What will all these people do once farmers are unnecessary?

~~~
kogepathic
_> What will all these people do once farmers are unnecessary?_

There aren't that many people working on farms in developed countries. In the
US, only around 3 million people (or <1% of the total population) work on a
farm. [0]

In other countries where many people are involved in agriculture, the pending
industrialisation/automation of farming will probably have a similar impact to
what happened in North America and Europe over the 20th century: more people
will move to urban areas and add value to the economy in other ways.

[0]
[https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resou...](https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resources/Highlights/Farm_Demographics/)

~~~
puranjay
I'm talking about India. 55% of the workforce turns into hundreds of millions
of people.

------
fragsworth
As a Roomba owner, I have to say that I'm not really impressed with their
decision to make another product when their first one barely even works.

> "Some 15 million of them are cleaning floors all over the planet, and
> they’re doing so reliably and affordably and autonomously enough that people
> keep on buying them"

It is absolutely not "reliable". It's _barely_ better than cleaning the floor
myself. Some days, cleaning the floor myself would actually be easier, or ends
up being what I have to do anyway. The number of issues I've run into with the
damned thing is absurd and I feel like they should be fixing those before
making a new product.

I think people are for the most part getting tricked into buying these.
They're not that great.

~~~
secure
I’ve had a Roomba 780 cleaning my apartment daily since 2013. Issues I’ve
encountered so far:

1\. It occasionally doesn’t properly return to the home base, because it’s
hard to find a good place for the home base where it can’t be moved/knocked
over accidentally. This happens maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks, and is just a
mild annoyance: you just need to carry the Roomba to its home base yourself.

2\. After 3 years of usage, the battery died in such a way that it emptied
rapidly enough for the Roomba to not be able to return to the home base. This
was easily fixed by installing a new battery.

I recently upgraded to the Roomba 980, and it seems to work better than the
780 — it cleans more quickly and returns to its home base more reliably. Also,
less cleaning required due to a different brush design.

Overall, I feel that I’m definitely getting my money’s worth out of the
product, and it’s doing a great job at vacuuming. YMMV, but for me, it’s
great.

~~~
josefresco
3x the value of a non-robotic vacuum?

~~~
hwillis
Better to compare it to a cleaning service. Say $30 an hour, and the roomba
does the rough equivalent of an hour a week when you let it run daily. 4 years
(208 weeks) of $30 is over $6000, ten times the price of the 780. Even if the
roomba does the equivalent of 6 minutes of maid-time each week, that's not
bad.

~~~
rubber_duck
Not even close - cleaning lady can do a lot more than just vacuum the floor.

>Say $30 an hour

Depends on where you live. Around here (CE Europe) I get cleaning service for
~5$/h (~15$ for 3 hours of work once a week).

~~~
hwillis
Youd have to pay for extra time for services besides vacuuming. Even if your
price is 6x lower, the roomba is still cheaper.

~~~
rubber_duck
But the cleaning lady doesn't take nearly as much time vacuuming as a roomba I
just don't think it's a comparable service at any level or that it can replace
a cleaning service - it can supplement it by vacuuming more often.

------
davexunit
The term "weed" feels pretty outdated at this point. People consider many
beneficial plants to be weeds just because they didn't put them there. For
example, people remove clover, a wonderful nitrogen fixer, from their lawns in
order to maintain their unsustainable monoculture of nonnative grass. Is a
weed-killing robot solving the right problem? Modern agriculture works against
nature rather than with it.

~~~
dpark
A weed is essentially any undesired plant that self propagates effectively.
The fact that some of them are beneficial in some aspect is irrelevant if they
are unwanted. The entire point of a garden is that it's full of stuff that
some human wants.

~~~
reustle
Their point is that if a clover is necessary for healthier vegetables, maybe
the education around what weeds are should be fixed.

~~~
jessaustin
_Clover_ is certainly not what concerns typical gardeners. Is there a reason I
should love the morning glories that are constantly trying to kill my
tomatoes?

~~~
dpark
Only because it's impossible to defeat. :(

------
Twirrim
Gah. I have to wonder who thought the ieee.org website design was a good idea.
2/3rds of the page taken up with not the article, but a whole bunch of noisy,
visually intrusive links to everything and its mother? The article sort of
squeezed in on the left 1/3rd seeming almost like an afterthought.

~~~
EdwinHoksberg
This is what it looks like on a 2560x1440 resolution monitor:
[https://i.imgur.com/08mYqWq.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/08mYqWq.jpg) Yes the
small column on the left is the article.

~~~
deepinthewoods
You've both zoomed out in your browsers. Press CTRL+ a few times until you get
back to 100%. Article takes up half the screen for me in Chrome+FF, 100%zoom @
1440p.

~~~
Twirrim
No I haven't. Standard 1080p display, multiple machines, multiple browsers
(Safari, Firefox & Chrome.) On all I get the same thing, the article is taking
up barely a third of the page.

[http://imgur.com/8Ce68DO](http://imgur.com/8Ce68DO)

[http://imgur.com/5nnteHu](http://imgur.com/5nnteHu)

To make it worse, those other three columns of links to other articles contain
animated gifs, really dragging attention away from the actual content.

------
snarfy
I think the traditional solution (weed barrier) is still better, and cheaper.

[http://www.homedepot.com/p/Vigoro-3-ft-x-50-ft-
Polyethylene-...](http://www.homedepot.com/p/Vigoro-3-ft-x-50-ft-Polyethylene-
Weed-Barrier-Landscape-Fabric-1142RV/206684876)

~~~
stusmall
I'm not a huge fan of landscape fabric. It works for a season or two but over
time it forms holes that weeds push through. You still have to manually weed
but now you are less likely to pull all the roots up.

The previous owner of my house used a ton of it as a quick solution to a weed
problem so they could more easily sell the house. I've spent a lot of time
ripping out their quick fix. I had a nice surprise of finding a bed of sad
irises under one.

------
modeless
> Currently I’m thinking that cameras connected to deep learning networks is
> the technology with the most promise to enable a new wave of low-cost
> robotic applications.

After his earlier comments about fancy sensors being too expensive I was
surprised to read this. But I agree. Once some cheap neural net ASICs come out
I expect a revolution in robotics will follow soon after.

~~~
melvinram
An alternative outcome might be that sensor prices drop due to mass production
with more adoption.

~~~
modeless
Cameras are pretty cheap and already mass produced like crazy. The expensive
part is the processing you need to extract high level information from the
pixels. That's why we need cheap neural net ASICs.

~~~
deepnotderp
Heh, sorry for the shameless plug, but that's one of the big target
applications for our chip: deep learning for robotics.

------
sgustard
It's not clear from the article, but if I let this loose on my lawn, will it
eliminate all the grass?

------
rmason
This looks like it would be fine for a homeowner that wants a garden but
doesn't like to weed. But looking at it from the commercial standpoint it
doesn't make much financial sense.

You'd need to spend nearly $109,000 per acre and that is a pretty small
vegetable commercial farm. In fact ten acres would probably be the minimum for
one family to make a living and you'd spend over a $1 million!

You can hire a whole lots of high school kids every year for a whole lot less
money. Doesn't mean it isn't cool technology, but then again so is a $450,000
Ford GT.

Still believe that commercial herbicides will soon be an endangered species.
Didn't get many farmers to agree with me twenty years ago but maybe more would
now.

~~~
tengbretson
I imagine once this is made to fit into the row spacing of commercial row-
crops, and purchased at scale, larger operations would be able to deploy these
at a cost competitive with herbicide applications. And once it gets even
within an order of magnitude of traditional herbicides, the implications for
organic crops could be huge!

~~~
rmason
Agree with you more than you do yourself. Herbicide costs are rising while
technology costs are declining. First use will be organic crops but I think it
will make sense for non-organic ones as well.

~~~
tengbretson
Once technology like this hits a critical mass, I'm not sure there will even
be the need for a distinction between organic and traditional agriculture.

edit: Though I suppose there will still need to be distinctions made to make
clear the differences between GMO varieties such as BT corn and the like.
However, maybe by then the definition of organic will widen to allow for the
incredible advancements that genetic engineering allows us.

~~~
mc32
There will be farmers who will want to perpetuate a distinction just as you
have microbrew vs craft vs "commercial" brewers.

Once a majority of produce and fruit can be classified as organic from a
chemicals PoV labor intensity may become a point of distinction in order to
fetch a better price in the marketplace (I say that as someone who typically
supports /buys/ organics).

~~~
tengbretson
I guess I don't understand the distinction you're talking about. Are you
saying that people would be inclined to pay more for food they knew had more
human hands involved in it?

It's a bizarre future, but I guess we're already seeing people pay 25x for a
hand bag if they know it was made in a conflict-free village or something of
that nature. I suppose its only natural that our abundance will begin to allow
us to start making those sorts of luxury designations for our food as well.

~~~
mc32
It's exactly that distinction I'm making. Oftentimes automated machinery is
better at making things than humans at making the same (furniture, cars,
shoes, etc.) but people like buying "crafted" items for various reasons
(vanity, support of craftspeople, local economy, what-have-you).

However, the main point is some farmers will find some kind of marketable
distinction bigger operations won't be able to leverage (labor intensity or
small production varietals "heirloom", etc.) Something which would allow them
to fetch a better price and make them viable as a business)

------
Animats
The wheels look too tiny for the real world. Nice idea, though.

This guy invented the Roomba? He must have been really screwed by iRobot if he
has to do a Kickstarter to fund his next project. He should either have enough
money or the reputation to talk to VCs.

~~~
jaclaz
I am also perplexed.

The "goal" on KickStarter is set as US$ 120,000 (at this moment it reached
more than double that US$ 265,213).

So he asked to receive between 108,000 and 110,000 US$ (net of the Kickstarter
fee of 5% and of the additional - absurd BTW - "payment fee between 3 and 5%).

This can be a rather large or a ridicoulosly small amount (of course it
depends on points of view) but I propend for the "ridicolously small".

A (hopefully) succesfull robotics engineer in his fifties should have (or can
procure through relations) that amount of money easily, and he is "only" a co-
founder (and CTO) of the new company.

It seems to me - I have noticed it on other projects that ask for otherwise
senselessly small amounts of financing - that Kickstarter is used only to give
some visibility to the product/invention.

Seen this way the 10,000-12,000 US$ (financed by crowd BTW) are more
"advertising expenses" than anything else, and even if at the end Kickstarter
gets (thanks to the higher level of founding contributions) double of that, it
is still peanuts for the amount of visibility it provides.

~~~
fenwick67
Yeah for projects like this the Kickstarter is really just used for "pre-
sales" and marketing.

------
sapote
Might work on the East Coast or in water-intensive gardens elsewhere, but in
California almost any reasonable garden will have a layer of rough mulch to
reduce evaporation (and suppress weeds). Maybe this robot could navigate my
mulch but I'm doubtful.

------
ChuckMcM
Joe Jones is one of my heros, I've still got my copy of "Robots: Inspiration
to Implementation" that was such a great focal point for robotics in the 90's.

Tilling seems like something that would be pretty challenging though. The
whole "weed/not weed" thing has a lot of interesting questions around it. I
always thought something that would keep your driveway and sidewalk clear of
snow would be the next bit opportunity to automate.

------
PerilousD
I can think of two very specific (for me) use case. Kill weeds in driveway
pavers / patios where anything growing green is fair game and a Poison Ivy
extreme prejudice terminator. I don't want to use pesticides since I have dogs
and enough land to see the occasional rabbit, turtle, garden snake and I don't
really want to harm them either.

~~~
monochromatic
Does Roundup actually hurt animals?

~~~
devrandomguy
Which animals has it been tested on, and where are the studies? Chemistry is
presumed dangerous until proven safe.

~~~
bluGill
pubmed is your friend:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10854122/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10854122/)
is a good example. "Multiple lifetime feeding studies have failed to
demonstrate any tumorigenic potential for glyphosate"

Roundup is about as safe is it comes - common vinegar is more toxic.

~~~
Jemmeh
Well there's still a lot of back and forth on this from my understanding.
Earlier this year some emails came to light from Monsanto regarding
ghostwriting some research, aka they wrote an article and more or less had
some scientists sign off on it as though they had done the research. They were
also tipped off about the International Agency for Research on Cancer's
determination for being a probable carcinogen so they were able to "prepare a
public relations assault on the finding well in advance of its publication".

Relevant Times Article: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-
roundup...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roundup-
safety-lawsuit.html)

~~~
bluGill
There is always the Monsanto conspiracy... That group is very vocal, but
hasn't done a very good job of getting real research past peer review (getting
their "research" into newspapers is easy and they do that all the time).
Monsanto is evil (source: a personal friend employed by Pioneer - about as
biased as they get), but getting past peer review is hard, even when you are
evil.

~~~
Jemmeh
Yes, but you can't ignore that the study you mentioned above was done funded
by Monsanto, they paid Intertek to do it. [1] "Ten of the 16 scientists on the
Intertek panel have been consultants for Monsanto in the past and two others
are former Monsanto employees, according to a roster published on Monsanto's
website." Paired with the unsealed internal emails from earlier this year,
it's at least enough to raise an eyebrow at.

Unfortunately I do not think that peer review is incorruptible either. It is
certainly important and speaks more for credibility, but especially in a case
like this where there is so much money involved, personally I'm still waiting
to see more information. I mean those emails just came out a few months ago,
who knows what else will be found at this point?

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-monsanto-herbicide-
glyphos...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-monsanto-herbicide-glyphosate-
idUSKBN0TQ2XH20151208)

------
Davidbrcz
Have a look at naio technologies ([http://www.naio-
technologies.com/en/](http://www.naio-technologies.com/en/)).

They make agricultural robots for easing farming. They have a bunch of robot
to remove weed

------
chiph
The "if it's small, it's a weed" is probably ok for a v1.0 product. They might
want to talk to Toshiba - they bought IBM's retail Point-of-Sale business a
few years ago, and they had a product called "Veggie Vision" [1] that
identified produce at the cash register via a camera.

Insert "Not Hotdog" joke here, but having a wifi connection to the cloud where
heavy-duty weed classification software could be run would keep the device
costs low.

[1]
[http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?i...](http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?id=2021)

~~~
jaclaz
>Insert "Not Hotdog" joke here, but having a wifi connection to the cloud
where heavy-duty weed classification software could be run would keep the
device costs low.

Actually I would like to insert here that time the connection was down for
half an hour and the thingy eradicated all aunt Julia's plants, and it's not a
joke (at least according to aunt Julia, who didn't laugh at all).

------
adolph
The article pointed out the inventor's book, Robot Programming : A Practical
Guide to Behavior-Based Robotics. [1] Are there any other
interesting/recommended texts for this domain?

The book refers to a website that seems to have been domain squatted by
GoDaddy. An alternate .net tld is present, but unfortunately uses old Java
applets. [2]

1\.
[https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0071427783/ref=rdr_ext_tub](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0071427783/ref=rdr_ext_tub)

2\.
[http://www.behaviorbasedprogramming.net/manual.html](http://www.behaviorbasedprogramming.net/manual.html)

------
martinmusio7
Tertill solves a big issue. Lots of ppl want to have a weed free garden and
don't have time/ don't want to pull out weeds all the time. But I do hope,
though, that Tertill is just a very basic starting point. I can immediately
think of 20-25 improvements.

------
oh_sigh
How long will weeds last if you keep decapitating them? I'd imagine they would
deplete the soil even faster than just letting them grow(which brings it's own
problems with shading out plants and propagation)?

------
Shivetya
It feels like everyone gets their own Martian rover to me. still a world of
solar powered helpers for menial tasks is interesting. with low enough costs
eventually you won't care about how many you need.

------
c3833174
The main issue with just trimming is that sprouts coming up from roots of
nearby trees have infinite energy and will get thicker every time you cut
them.

Not to mention that the worst weeds also spread horizontally

------
cmurf
Seems like insects and rabbits are a bigger problem for the typical backyard
gardener than weeds. So if the robot has insect and rabbit shooing modes,
maybe...

------
jprissi
Does anyone know why the wheels are inclined this way? I guess it has much
more grip on the soil this way but is there something else?

~~~
colordrops
It's explained in the video. It scrubs the ground to prevent weed saplings
from growing.

~~~
jprissi
Thanks, I didn't pay attention to the video the moment he said that.

------
purpleidea
What stops someone from walking up to your garden and stealing your robot?

~~~
visarga
The fact that it isn't worth the effort to steal it? I mean, it's a nice demo,
but it has to be better than that to be useful. They say it needs planks all
around the work zone. That could be solved with a camera placed at some
height. What if the soil has small ditches, as it is the practice when
planting? It needs nice level soil to work, as well. It's not using computer
vision, or not an advanced form of CV to distinguish good from bad plants. So
it requires manual identification for each plant. In my opinion, it's not
ready for prime time yet.

------
rmrm
Commercial organic farms mulch heavily, which nicely controls weeds.

Non organic farms spray.

Home gardeners apparently aren't mulching, which has myriad other benefits
besides weed control. I love robots, but mulch is a much better solution.

~~~
topspin
>> "Home gardeners apparently aren't mulching"

Yeah.. wow. Stop by a Home Depot sometime next spring and observe the
mountains of bagged mulch they stock. Home gardeners and hobby farmers do
indeed mulch. A lot. Where I am they stack mulch between gas pumps at every
station. If that's too much trouble a single call will have a truckload on
your property inside a week.

Simple weed killing robots of the sort depicted here will find their home on
lawns. We're not all living in a coastal desert; ample fresh water affords
nice lawns and that means squabbling with weeds.

~~~
rmrm
I was just responding to the video, which seems to clearly be an unmulched
home garden. So I am assuming from their marketing that is the application
they are targeting.

------
tertillpower
I like this robot. It's cute

~~~
alsoagree
yes

~~~
alsoagree
surprised more people aren't pointing this out

------
sitkack
Needs lasers, invasive bugs are worse.

------
trhway
scale it up a bit and drop a bunch of them in Middle East to weed out
terrorists.

------
khrm
Am I the only one who had to click to find out that weed being talk about
isn't Marijuana?

------
macawfish
This is ridiculous but I'd rather see people going this route than spraying
glyphosate or some other poison. That said, the root of this is a dangerous
kind of hubris.

The idea of weeds is a tragic fallacy. There are some "weeds" that are selling
for up to $15/lb (nettles, lambs quarter). Most weeds are beneficial for
cooking and herbal medicine. And most any weed can have some kind of
beneficial role in the garden.

Same thing goes for "pests". One plant's pest is another plant's companion.

Yet people are all but obsessed with exterminating misunderstood creatures
from their local ecosystems. In my view, this robot is not so far off in the
grand scheme of things from a robot that goes around killing other animals and
even people, based on shallow, superficial misunderstandings of another
being's potential.

I wish as much engineering effort went into understanding as it does into
stuff like this.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Lets not get hyperbolic - folks pull plants for a local monoculture of
beneficial botany. That's all. Its not a skynet extermination program or
anything.

Heck, I pull volunteer flowers from my flower bed if they don't jibe with this
years' layout. Its not about what's a 'weed'. Its about what I want in this
here bed, and what I want in that one over there.

~~~
macawfish
On one hand, I feel you. Actually, I think a "weeding robot", programmed well,
is a much better alternative to the chemical/GMO program.

But weeding as an act of moderate human selection isn't what irritates me.
It's peoples' blind acceptance of an entire false taxonomy of "good" vs "bad"
plants/organisms. It's dualistic and dangerous in the long run. It's stupidity
posed as common sense. It's a kind of eugenics that's directed not just at
humans but at entire ecologies.

Right now what Monsanto is doing with chemical resistant plants is
unconscionable. The glyphosate scheme is obscene. It's _worse_ than some
skynet extermination program. In the midst of a massive loss of the earth's
sustaining biodiversity, we have unchecked corporate powers playing out
obscene world domination plans. The stakes are _too high_. Why do people feel
so nonchalant about the Roundup scheme? Why do we eat their corn? Cause
they're only killing weeds.

There's a massive extinction happening right now. What are we doing?
Programming robots to decrease biodiversity.

