Soon enough, farmers won’t have to worry about spraying their fields with chemicals to keep them weed-free. Small Robot Company (SRC) and RootWave, two agritech start-ups based in the UK, have joined forces to build a high-precision robot that will eliminate weeds by zapping them with electricity. The weed-zapping service is expected to be available in 2021.
The monitoring robot, Tom, can cover 20 hectares a day, can create maps of weeds on a farm, helping to kill them by using electricity. (Image Credit: Small Robot Company)
Small Robot has already developed a trio of lightweight agriculture robots, called Tom, ***, and Harry, which monitors, feed/weed and seed crops through an AI system known as “Wilma.” The goal is to have the robots create high-resolution crop maps, which allows precision husbandry with very little impact on the environment.
Tom, the monitoring robot that covers about 20 hectares a day uses computer vision to map out the weeds in a field. It can also gather 6TB of sensor data before needing a new battery and data download. It will cost £15 per hectare to monitor and monitoring robot is expected to visit an assigned field four times during the growing season. The robot also features an Nvidia Jetson System-on-Module (SoM) with CPU, GPU, power management, RAM and flash storage on one board. Tom’s cameras have the ability to view details of a plant at a sub-millimetre resolution, while having less than 1mm per pixel resolution on the ground. Power comes from four lithium iron phosphate batteries.
The Wilma AI system has the ability to distinguish wheat from broad-leaved weeds and can also identify various grass-types weeds, such as blackgrass, brome and ryegrass, which are problematic for northern European farmers. It can also be tough for the AI system to detect because of their structural similarity to wheat. The weeding robot, ***, can remove weeds either by using a small amount of chemicals or by squishing them. The next step will be to combine this with RootWave technology, which kills weeds by using an electric current, causing the weeds to boil inside.
“Farmers are really desperate for an alternative to the chemical control of weeds,” says Sam Watson Jones, chief executive of Small Robot Company. “Existing chemicals are becoming less effective against weeds and we are seeing bans on the use of chemicals such as glyphosate.” Experts believe that glyphosate, an ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, causes cancer in humans, therefore, leading to its banishment in several countries, including Austria, the Czech Republic, Italy and the Netherlands. It will be discontinued in Germany and France starting in 2023. Alternatives to glyphosate, like lasers or jets of hot water, are more expensive and require lots of energy to kill weeds. Zapping weeds by using electricity can be as inexpensive as using chemical herbicides, costing only six euros per hectare.
Small Robot Company and RootWave will be aiming to have a system-readily available for commercial testing by autumn 2021. If all goes well, the robots could challenge the $26bn a year global herbicide industry. Numerous precision weeding start-up companies have started to come up with alternative methods to the chemical spraying model, including Ecorobotix. The Swiss start-up uses computer vision to locate weeds, sending a small amount of chemicals to any plants that may be harmful to crops. Their system currently uses 20 times less herbicide than traditional methods.
Agrointelli, a Denmark-based start-up, is also building farming robots that send specified doses of herbicide to weeds, effectively eliminating them. Additionally, Naio Technologies in Toulouse is developing robots to mechanically weed large vegetable farms. RootWave has also joined up with Steketee, an agricultural equipment company located in the Netherlands, to build an electric weed zapper that can be used with a tractor. It would also be the first time that robots could weed via electricity based on a combination of a RootWave and Small Robot weeder.
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