Agriculture robots to help you on weeding
Which agriculture robots show effective weeding results?
Naïo is in Europe the market leader for agriculture weeding robots. Founded in 2011, they have made kilometers on the field for development. Now, commercial available weeding robots from Naïo are running on different continents. The Dino in lettuce is a key example of 'fit for purpose' and effective results in the field are shown.
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Other key examples for weeding robots: FarmDroid, combing seeding and weeding in one agriculture robot that stays on the field during growth. And Farmwise in the US, who are operating with a serious fleet of agriculture robots with the recognizable orange tractors.
Why is weeding so easy for you but complex for robots?
A human perspective to weeding by agriculture robots - With hoeing you walk in a pattern over the field, to remove specific plants. At the moment you are born as an infant (well before your first birthday) there's already everything on board so that by 12 years of age, when you start learning from you parents how to do weeding tools.
At twelve years old most kids can have learned all about how to do some serious weeding job; but seldom do adults ever wonder why it takes us humans up until our teenagehoods just to be able to use simple things we were naturally designed with at birth?
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For agriculture robots, it's the same. At the start, perhaps all technical sensors and actuators are there ... but a it needs to be trained and be able to learn how to handle plants. Every plant, every day, it's a unique situation ... to decide to leave the plant (crop) to remove the plant (weed).
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The good news and a major difference compared to humans: Once a manufacturer is able to make a good agriculture robot, a full 1:1 reproduction is easily possible and you can benefit on you your farm from the learned capabilities on other farms.
How can agriculture robots help you weeding effectively?
The weeding capabilities of an agriculture robot are into high degree depended on the weeding-tooling you attach. How can the tool make a difference for the result of the robot?
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Remove the weed inside the line of crops OR only remove the weeds within the open space between the different lines of crop. By recognizing on plant level what is a crop and what is a weed OR just operating in a straight line with a hoe, respectively.
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Have an easy routing OR take a very precise operations. By just navigating on RTK GPS in the field OR by precise manoeuvrability with camera assist, respectively.
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Strong mechanical force OR careful treatment. Meaning, you may have to choice between either missing a weed or to intentionally damage a crop.