Man Finally Makes the Weed-Removing Robot 258
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the Ludington Daily News, Michigan, Danish agricultural engineers have built a robot to help farmers with weeds. The Hortibot is about 3-foot-by-3-foot, is self-propelled, and uses global positioning system (GPS). It can recognize 25 different kinds of weeds and eliminate them by using its weed-removing attachments. It's also very environmentally friendly because it can reduce herbicide usage by 75 percent. But so far, it's only a prototype and the Danish engineers need to find a manufacturer for distribution."
Well it's about time (Score:5, Funny)
Robots with FLAME THROWERS? (Score:3, Funny)
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Well, I initially misread the caption as Man Finally Makes Weed-Smoking Robot...
Maybe I was closer to the truth than I thought...
Hey, Tin Man - got a light?
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And I misinterpreted the title as a robot designed to search for and destroy Cannabis fields. Unfortunately, it turned out that this robot is just designed to eliminate ordinary weeds from fields of useful crops.
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The only reason it is still around as a mass drug crop is that governments need a scarecrow for various varieties of "war of drugs".
By the way, flamethrowers will not help either. As the ifor troops in Afganistan learned it do
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What would be even cooler (Score:5, Funny)
Transporter_ii
Re:What would be even cooler (Score:5, Funny)
That would be awesome... if the cops catch your robot tending to the weed it can be programmed to say uhh I forgot who I'm growing this hash for man I have only so much RAM to devote to remembering things and I just can't remember who programmed me to grow all this sticky bud and there's nothing the pigs can do because your robot will be programmed to enjoy prison and be willing to spend years there in standby mode to conserve battery life but if the grower is some guy you'd have to promise him that you'll commute his sentence so he can perjure himself all he wants for you knowing you'll eventually bail him out... but under the existing system you can't do that unless you're the president who must have access to a mean supply of weed because you can see how worried he's been looking lately.
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Excuse me, what have you been smoking?
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Re:What would be even cooler (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm sorry, The Matrix was just on... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Well it's about time (Score:4, Funny)
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It recognizes weeds? Excellent. What else? (Score:2)
Re:It recognizes weeds? Excellent. What else? (Score:5, Funny)
Sarah Connor?
Let us pray (Score:2)
I suppose we should also pray that is not a day people will feel free to neglect themselves.
I wonder how agriculture might change if a machine can really push a crop through (or in other fields, get whatever job done), like the next generation of iPhone [comics.com].
Robot lawnmower kills Danish man (Score:2)
http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/31/robot-lawnmower -kills-danish-man-begins-resistance/ [engadget.com]
http://www.hortibot.dk/index.html [hortibot.dk]
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From the hortibot site:
"Illustration of the synergy obtained by combining the commercial remote controlled Spider (top left) with the autonomous AgRobot research platform (top left) from Aarhus University, Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Research Centre Bygholm."
and the lawnmower was a Spider.
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Oh. My. FSM.
I clicked on the link and the formatting's even worse than here, since /. thankfully does not allow colour. FSM be praised.
Anyway, this does seem an interesting idea - however, somebody has to design the robots, repair the robots, invent the stuff they want the robots to produce...
Robots can reduce or maybe even remove the need for manual labour. But man will always find something to do. And then start doing it in exchange for some other thing somebody else enjoys doing. And there we go again
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For your objections, here are my reflection on theses subjects:
Design of the robots:
It is the transition phase between our society model and the new society model. And for the second, third, Nth generation of theses robots see 'Invent the stuff'
Repair the robots:
Create some robots to replace (easier) or
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Even disregarding the reasons you mentioned, money is not going to disappear.
It is too convenient a concept; direct trade of one thing for another requires two people to each find a thing the other one wants. That can get quite complicated, whilst money is money is money and can be exchanged for anything, given large enough quantities.
And until someone builds a machine which can at least comprehend human language, I won't believe you can build a machine which could invent anything.
These are all nice, ut
My mortal enemy (Score:5, Funny)
Right after I get up off the couch
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What does this thing look like? (Score:4, Insightful)
They say it identifies 25 types of weeds but at what accuracy? I would think accuracy is more important than total number of detectable weeds. If it misidentified your crop as weed you might lose a lot. Imagine coming home one day and it has pulled out or burned your entire crop and it just sits there with a grin.
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Also, the Danish engineers probably will have to arm their robots to protect them from angry, paranoid pot-growers everywhere.
Finally, a robot with cat-shaped grippers and a cat-Taser will be welcome, although a simple cat-sized mulching attachment would be just fine by me.
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They could add a couple of sanity checks to the GUI:
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A weed is ready to be destroyed. Allow / Deny?
]{
This is what it looks like (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.hortibot.dk/index.html [hortibot.dk]
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You tell it "this" is the stuff I want to grow.
"That list" you have, you pull out and incinerate keeping all seeds contained.
"Take pictures" of anything else like kitty cats, praying mantis, grasshoppers having sex and stuff.
Post pictures on a website.
"Profit."
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It doesn't work (Score:3, Insightful)
It works badly/not at all. Any horticulturalist will tell you that weeds are just flowers no one likes. Try teaching that distinction to today's robots.
Hello, We'd Like to Buy You Out (Score:5, Insightful)
Ho Hum, call me when they perfect the (Score:5, Funny)
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Robot: *cough*cough* Bite my shiny metal *cough* ass!
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Jarret: Now give it up for my best friend and my roommate Goby.
(Goby walks in and places his face in front of the camera)
Goby: Domo we already got the weed smoking robot. Domo (turns head toward Jarret) Domo, Domo, Domo.
(Laughs while he sits down)
Jarret: What a minute; weed-smoking robot. What are you talking about?
Goby: I'm talking about my masterpiece. I've invented the world's first weed smokin
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This is great, but (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm.... lasers... (Score:4, Funny)
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Why has it taken so long? (Score:5, Funny)
bah! (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory Joke (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, Bush announces a major victory in the war on drugs.
Link to Hortibot project (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't look like they've gone too far yet, but interesting nevertheless.
Spitting flames and shooting laser? (Score:2)
I, for one, welcome our flame-spitting and laser-shooting overlord. Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these Linux-running robots, what kind of profitable business plan can you come up with? Or, if you are just a gamer type, imagine a lan party, priceless.
The only thing missing now is a console so that we can issue the command "sudo make me a sandwich".
Jokes are cool, But let's talk about farm robots. (Score:4, Interesting)
I would appear that the farmers expect to have severe labor problems if the federal government succeeds in preventing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from entering the US without documentation. Farmers depend on lots of low-cost seasonal labor to get their harvest picked. Not so much for grains, but for fruits, berries, and vegetables.
Presently, as I understand the situation, thousands of migrant laborers follow the harvest and provide the long, hard bend-pick-stoop labor needed to get the produce off the ground and onto inspection belts and shipping boxes. Most (I believe, and I may be wrong) of these migrant labors are Mexicans and Central Americans living in the USA without immigration papers. This situation has been like this for about 100 years, since the mechanization of farm planting equipment led to much larger harvests. Using low-cost labor has been the only way to harvest the food. And low-cost has come to mean illegal immigrants. These people have been ruthlessly exploited and little had been done to improve their situation until Cesar Chavez energized the United Farm Workers union in the late 1960's. However the massive overpopulation of Mexico has led to the need for Mexico to send millions of their people to the USA. Stoop labor during harvest season has been the main source of employment for these people, so the cycle of exploitation begins anew.
The introduction of high-technology into a field dominated by serf labor clearly upsets the standard order of things. The robotic technology has always been too expensive and the serf labor too cheap for the any high-tech developments in food harvesting. But if the cost of labor goes up (due to effective immigration law enforcement, a really big if ) at the same time that technological costs go down, then this will lead to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers.
Maybe, and not all at once. For the robots cost a lot of money. A migrant worker can pick a lot of food for the cost of the robot at $70,000. And immigration laws are never seriously enforced after a certain period of 'clamping down on illegals', a period which we are going through now. There simply is no other option to getting the food picked. This situation isn't going to change. Expect all the high-technology in farm work to take place in Europe where they don't have the masses of undocumented and untrackable migrant farm workers to pick the food.
In reality, there is a real need for harvest robots. But it is not in harvesting food; it is in harvesting land mines. No one is going to just walk out into a mine field and just pick up the bombs by hand (regardless of how many little plastic 'keys to heaven' the mullahs give them). And do it day in, day out, for very little money. Even if for some insane reason they actually wanted to, they would eventually all get blown up. This is true robot work. The harvest robot manufacturers should get some NGO to finance all their R&D in return for donating thousands of robot units to clear the vast minefields. Unfortunately, there is no one like Princess Diana around anymore to champion this cause. Shit, maybe we could get Paris Hilton to rally the cause. Good luck!
Re:Jokes are cool, But let's talk about farm robot (Score:2)
Even though I am not Mexican, and a US citizen, I was one of those low-cost seasonal laborers when in my teens. Cucumbers were my specialty. Believe me, that work sucks; Backbreaking, hot, miserable, endless, and not much to show for it at the end of the day. And I had a home to go back to, and dinner waiting for me when I got there, so I had it better than the current crop of immigrants. It's about time the ag-bots went into pr
Thanks for the reply (Score:2)
I have to agree, technology is the way
The liberal dilemma (Score:2)
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But I'm beginning to wonder if the reason that our neighbors live so poorly is not due to a 'disfunctional' culture. The migrants that I've met or have read interviews with often have many more children that they could ever hope to provide minimum subsistence for. They think that I'm weird because I have no children, and I
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Either way it sucks for them, and history will not be kind to us for forcing them into having to choose between really bad options while we, for the most part, live well.
Or it may look well upon us. Fast change usually brings about disaster.
But I'm beginning to wonder if the reason that our neighbors live so poorly is not due to a 'disfunctional' culture. The migrants that I've met or have read interviews with often have many more children that they could ever hope to provide minimum subsistence for. They think that I'm weird because I have no children, and I can't believe that they don't see anything unusual about having ten children and a sub-minimum wage job as an illegal immigrant 2000 miles away from their family.
It's a cultural problem basically, they were born into a culture that is based on the view that there is high child morality. Having 6 kids isn't a problem if only 2 live to breed but it is if all 6 do. With time this will probably change but culture determines a lot of things and changes slowly. It's also another reason for why fast change to "do the right thing" can backfire. Africa had a stable population before things like modern
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It's a cultural problem basically, they were born into a culture that is based on the view that there is high child morality.
It's only indirectly related to child mortality. You have a lot of kids because they are your retirement plan. When you are too old to work, and you are too poor to save money, and the government doesn't provide anything like Social Security - then your only recourse is to have a lot of kids so that someone will take care of you. Having more kids increases the odds that one or more of them will live longer than you and have the means to take care of you.
I fear something entirely different coming from all this mechanization.
Don't sweat it too much - we've been progressing tec
Re:Jokes are cool, But let's talk about farm robot (Score:2)
Hate to break it to you, but it's been happening for 100+ years and there has been no disaster yet. It's called progress, you're living in the wrong age if you don't like advancement.
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I don't think that robots are going to harvest because at the present it is still too expensive to do so. Migrant labor is still much cheaper.
If the robots suddenly became very cheap, and that is always a possibility, then putting tens of thousands of migrant workers out of jobs would have consequences. One is that many of them would stave, and two is that ma
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Not meant to completely reject, that in the short-term at least, there can be problems caused by mechanisation, but there's a great quote from That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen [bastiat.org] (Frederic Bastiat, 1850) on this subject.
Re:Jokes are cool, But let's talk about farm robot (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Jokes are cool, But let's talk about farm robot (Score:3, Insightful)
Notice first that this is being developed in Germany, not the US. The idea of using computerization on farms is nothing new in Europe.
When I toured Europe I stayed with a family who ran a chicken farm. The father had developed a way to harvest the eggs and feed the chickens all on his own using computerization and robotics. He says his biggest labor expense is going in and cleaning out the dead chickens about once a week. Purdue gave him an award for developing this system, and it's being used all across Eu
Lie: "simply no other option" (Score:2)
Robogriculture in the nano scale (Score:2)
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Personally, I'd love to see macro-sized robots be successful. Doeses of microscopic things can't be removed from the environment, so they have long-term and uninteded consequences. Dumping poison on the fields has gotten us this far, but simply pulling the weeds seems cleaner and more direct, if only automation ever
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While a robot is good, a swarm of nanorobots or molecular machines would be much better and with greater efficiency, taking care of our crops at the molecular level.
Why do you think they could do it with greater efficiencies? Large scale robots can take advantage of certain economies of scale that microscopic ones don't have, it's not difficult to add communication capabilities, sensors (video, GPS, laser range-finders), and such. You can't fit that on a nanobot. You can't power that from a nanobot, short of mystic energy fields, and you're going to have a very very hard time coordinating your nanobots under any circumstances.
And, assuming they could be manufactured
When aliens land... (Score:5, Funny)
Congratulations... (Score:5, Funny)
So the Danes finally managed to clone "Mexicans"?
Based on the name of the newspaper... (Score:2)
Hortibot not as popular as ... (Score:3, Funny)
SLM
Make It From Bamboo (Score:2)
Just as long as we can stop it from "evolving" or adding humans, or our food plants, to its list of "weeds".
Just get a herd of goats instead (Score:5, Informative)
Of course if your problem is bracken, bring on the Robot. Nothing eats that stuff.
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Anyway, agriculture is inherently in conflict with nature. Most (all?) of our food crops are so different from the native species that any attempt to harm
That's nice, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, this sounds great (Score:2)
Robots? pfft (Score:2)
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(* Herbicide sprayed soils are essentially dead and still need to be cured. If a herbicide sprayed soil contains a lot of weed th
Pfff (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems nobody addresses the questionable assumption that weeds are somehow 'bad'. Nature lives in harmony without us humans quite well (arguably we rather disrupt the harmony), and there is a reason weeds grow near crops. Hint: the reason is not to be exterminated by man-made robots. Weeds actually often replenish the soil! For those interested, I can name several exampl
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Hmmm... (Score:2)
John Henry versus the steam engine, except John Henry becomes a migrant farm worker and the steam engine becomes this weeding robot contraption. Actually, I think someone is working on a robot that can pick crrops that traditionally needed the human touch, so maybe that would be better.
I'm up too late. Not making sense.
First pulling weeds; next picking fruit (Score:2)
http://kernow.curtin.edu.au/www/Agrirobot1/frutro
This is coming much faster than most expect. Which (to stand up on a political soapbox) there really is no need for a permanent underclass of immigrant laborers to supposedly do jobs locals are unwilling to take. Because machines will take over those jobs very soon anyway.
Man Finally Makes the Weed-Removing Robot (Score:2)
Pulling Weeds (Score:3, Funny)
Busted...in Baylor County! (Score:2)
(Don't worry, the link is a google cache of lyrics to a song. The link is safe for work, home, men, women, children, small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, etc.)
...and everybody moves up in the world (Score:2)
Re:Weed-removing attachments? (Score:5, Informative)
If you RTFA you will notice that lasers are in fact one of the "weed-removing attachments" they have.
Re:Weed-removing attachments? (Score:5, Funny)
So, in other words, it smokes the weed...
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Actually, that was Clinton.
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I think i know how you feel.
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IT'S A TRAP!
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Look under products and automatic mowers, they have two types an auto mower which can operate 24 hours a day and goes back to it's base station to charge and a solar powered version.
According to the site the auto mower is good for up to 1500 m, while the solar version is good for up to 1200 m.
They both use a safe cutting system and operate similar to grazing animal, in that they wonder around randomly, with sensors to go around any sta
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iMower
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