Weeding robots are edging closer to the agricultural mainstream, thanks to varied concepts coming to fruition in the US and UK.
With herbicide resistance a growing problem, and a shortage of farm labour affecting producers on both sides of the Atlantic, the moment seems ripe for technological breakthroughs in this area.
Titan, an autonomous robot from start-up FarmWise, has been tested over the last few years on farms in California and Arizona. It uses machine vision to distinguish weeds from crops, then snips them using hundreds of tiny blades – all directed from an iPad.
The company has now launched a more lightweight option called the Vulcan, which is pulled by — and controlled from — a tractor. Its designers compare the cab’s touchscreen interface to that of the Tesla.
Using the 15,000 hours of data collected so far, the team hope to develop other useful products, in due course. But for now, the artificial intelligence behind the technology is being further improved so the robots can be applied in a much larger range of crops.
Robots address dual problems
The CLAWS rover, a robot developed in the UK by Pollybell Farms and Agri-EPI Centre, looks a lot different to its American cousin, and while its concept of AI-assisted automated weeding with minimal soil disruption is similar, it has some notable design departures.
Its ultra-lightweight nature makes it fully solar-powered, offering the potential of greater cost-effectiveness and improved sustainability credentials for farmers. It also uses concentrated beams, rather than mechanical approaches, to do the weeding.
While all this sounds promising, the team behind the Innovate UK-funded project appear to be slightly behind Titan and Vulcan in terms of gathering field data. Trials are beginning this year, with possible commercialisation to come in 2024.
Data takes tech beyond weeding
Data will ultimately be where added value is delivered for farmers adopting such technologies — something which is also anticipated by Earth Rover, the start-up behind CLAWS.
“One of the biggest challenges for organic farmers is to understand what is the true yield for every single seed planted,” said James Miller, its COO.
“The CLAWS rover not only enables us to have an autonomous, non-chemical, weeding solution, but have real-time field scouting data from the field at the crucial growth stages. This provides vital information to understand where the yield loss comes from and enable timely decision making to optimise the yield.”
