When our agricultural field is still using herbicides in large quantities, tens of thousands of acres of vegetable farms in the United States no longer use herbicides! It adopts the robot laser weeding mode. Such a laser weeding robot can remove 100,000 weeds per hour with an accuracy of submillimeter. And all thanks to the remarkable development of artificial intelligence (AI).
Weeding with "artificial intelligence"!
In the Central Valley Farm in California, this is the national vegetable basket, more than 1/3 of the country's vegetables and 2/3 of the fruit are produced in California, the total area of the farm is more than 25 million acres, they grow vegetables like this.
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It's a company called Carbon Robotics that has developed LaserWeeder, a robot that uses artificial intelligence and laser technology to wipe out weeds in the field. The robots can accurately identify and eliminate weeds without damaging crops or disturbing soils, and can also help farmers solve labor shortages and reduce herbicide costs. In addition, Carbon Robotics also received $30 million in Series C financing, which is planned to expand its business in North America and develop new software and hardware products to hit the international market.
Weeding principle:
LaserWeeder's weeding principle uses a high-power laser to emit heat energy and aim it at the growth point of the weed, causing it to wither and die. Laser weeding:
On the one hand, LaserWeeder is equipped with advanced computer vision and artificial intelligence technology that can distinguish crops and weeds in real time and adjust laser intensity and frequency according to different crops.
On the other hand, LaserWeeder can also collect and analyze field data, such as crop number, size, health, soil moisture, etc., to provide farmers with more information and recommendations.
Laser technology
Navigation features
Traditional weed control methods have many disadvantages: the use of herbicides can contaminate the environment and crops, affecting quality and safety; The use of mechanical weeding can disrupt soil structure and ecological balance; Manual weeding is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and difficult to recruit and manage.
LaserWeeder can efficiently remove weeds without the use of herbicides and mechanical weeding, protecting the health of crops and soil, and saving manpower and material resources.
When will the mainland popularize laser weeding robots?
According to authoritative statistics, the agricultural departments of various countries around the world allow the use of more than 200 kinds of herbicides, only the continent is not complete statistics, the use of herbicides is as high as 100,000 tons per year, although it brings convenience, but at the same time to farmland, water, the atmosphere caused serious pollution, in turn will pollute crops, causing a variety of food safety problems, so the world is calling for an end to the abuse of herbicides.
Mainland agriculture is different from American agriculture, at present, the weeder LaserWeeder can only be used for large farmland of more than 1200 acres, and is not suitable for small-scale agricultural production in the mainland, and the price is expensive, so it is not suitable for mainland agricultural production.
However, as the mainland continues to promote "robot +" to empower all walks of life, and with the continuous improvement of the mainland's agricultural large-scale operation and mechanization level, I believe that more applicable products will emerge in the future.
About agricultural robots
Today, agricultural robots are a fast-growing market, and the global agricultural robots market size is expected to reach $16.5 billion by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 25.34%. The demand for agricultural robots mainly comes from the improvement of efficiency, quality, sustainability and safety of agricultural production, as well as the shortage of agricultural labor and the rise in costs. Weeding is one of the important and difficult links in agricultural production, and agricultural robots that can provide effective, environmentally friendly and intelligent weeding solutions have huge market potential.
In addition to the laser weeding robot introduced above, in recent years, with the rapid rise and vigorous development of Beidou navigation, artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things and advanced manufacturing and other technical fields, lawn mowers are also accelerating iterative upgrading.
01 Electric weeding
The British company Small Robot has successfully developed a robot that can control weeds. The robot can accurately catch the weeds that need to be removed and successfully eradicate them with the help of electricity technology.
Robots Tom (left) and Dick (right) work on a farm
Tom the robot "scans" 20 hectares of land every day and collects data for Dick, the robot who will be on the field next. Dick the "Weeder" can then use this data to remove weeds. Finally, Harry the robot will be able to sow seeds on clean land.
The company says that once the complete "weed-seed" system is operational, it can help farmers save 40 percent in costs and reduce pesticide use by up to 95 percent.
02 Flame weeding
This Beidou navigation rotary tillage sowing flame sealing compound operation machine and Beidou navigation digital counter-row mechanical weeder are independently developed by the scientific research team of Zhang Ruihong, a professor at the School of Mechanical Engineering of Yangzhou University.
According to Ji Zhangding, an agronomist in Yangzhou City, the cost of flame sealing grass using liquefied gas as fuel is 12-15 yuan / mu, which is 5 yuan / mu more than the use of herbal sealing agent; As far as rice is concerned, the cost of two herbicides is 40-60 yuan / mu, while precision mechanical weeding only costs 10 yuan / mu for fuel and 5 yuan / mu for depreciation of machinery. In general, flame sealing plus precision mechanical weeding is 30 yuan / mu compared to chemical weeding.
Since the beginning of this year, with the explosive chatGPT has triggered a boom in artificial intelligence, followed by the concept of "embodied intelligence" of AI+ robots, etc., each round of new scientific and technological revolution and the evolution of industrial revolution has prompted artificial intelligence (AI) to come out of the laboratory, into the daily everything and blend with it.
With the development of AI, the whole society will invest more R&D forces and more cutting-edge technologies to continue to promote the development of agriculture + AI technology and help the sustainable and humanized development of agricultural science and technology.
At the beginning of this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other 17 departments jointly issued the ""Robot +" Application Action Implementation Plan (hereinafter referred to as the "Plan"), which clearly proposed to focus on 10 key application areas, namely manufacturing, agriculture, construction, energy, commerce and logistics in the field of economic development, medical and health, elderly care services, education, commercial community services, safety emergency and extreme environment applications in the field of social and people's livelihood.
The release of the "Plan" has pressed the "accelerator button" for the development of China's robot industry, promoting robots to enter thousands of households faster and accommodate thousands of industries. According to the "China Robot Industry Development Report (2022)", in 2021, the operating income of the mainland robot industry exceeded 130 billion yuan, and the output of industrial robots reached 366,000 units, an increase of 10 times over 2015, ranking the world's largest industrial robot market.
It is also expected that more agricultural robots that adapt to the current situation of mainland agriculture will enter the production, contribute to the development of mainland agriculture, and give full play to the leading role of the real "robot +"!