Since the advent of herbicides in the 1940s, many farmers have opted to use chemicals to ward pests off of their crops. Nowadays, we know the harmful effects of herbicides to our health. But, nobody wants to go back to the labor-intensive and grueling method of hand-weeding because it's too tedious and time-consuming, not to mention, agonizing for farmers to do. There's a new alternative which solves these problems: robots.
Manufacturers from Denmark and the United States have shipped several of their farming droids to fields in Australia to help them removing the weeds around their crops. They are designed to cut off the weeds using knives and wires, with the help of GPS and cameras to direct them where to go.
Qualipac, a farming enterprise with several locations in Queensland, Australia, has recently imported the machines because they wanted to cut down on herbicide use, as well as reducing their spending on weed control. Troy Qualischefski, the owner and director of Qualipac, says these robots will help them do the trick.
Currently, they are testing out two robots: the FarmDroid FD20 from Denmark and the Stout Smart Cultivator from the US. The difference between the two is that the Danish robot is a self-driving robot that weeds and seeds using GPS, while the American one is attached to a tractor and does the weeding through cameras and AI.
You might be thinking, how do these robots distinguish between weeds and crops? Sal Espinoza of Stout answers that by saying that these machines were trained to understand the different varieties of crops they will see on the field. So, even if you were to put a bowl of salad in front of it, it would recognize that as lettuce.
Of course, at the moment, these farmbots will not completely eliminate herbicide use. But, in time, companies like Stout and Hort Innovation hope that these new technologies will reduce the industry's reliance on chemicals to almost zero. -via MetaFilter
(Image credit: Swarm Farm Robotics)