Roomba Inventor Joe Jones on His New Weed-Killing Robot
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
However, a concern that I'm sure they've thought a lot about is in it's technique. I really only care about making sure there are no weeds within, say, 8 inches of my plants (or put another way, my level of concern about a weed is proportional to it's distance from my vegetable or flower plant). This looks like it will weed everything except the 8 inches around the plant. Never mind things like cucumbers that spread out on the ground and have important bits that are short and can't be contained by the wire protectors. Still, an exciting place to start.
I always imagined something with long spindly legs that would cut, inject or spray things that it identified as weeds by leaves. For me, the weeds that are the most trouble are those close to or mixed in with plants. Anything on its own isn't that hard to pull out.
Does it detect cliffs or edges and avoid falling down?
But more importantly, time spent "in the garden" includes a lot of inspection and minor adjustments to all kinds of things— move plants on a trellis, pinching suckers off the tomatoes, clipping blighted leaves off of plants, ensuring flowers are getting fertilized, monitoring fruit growth, etc.
All of this stuff is an essential part of being in tune with what's going on out there, and I'm not sure that having a robot do one small piece of it is beneficial. Basically, this product doesn't really look like it was built by a gardener— it looks like it was someone who had a solution they wanted to apply elsewhere, and spent 15 minutes watching a gardener at work, without really understanding what they were doing.
Basically I'm just not sure it's realistic to pitch this product to someone who wants to have an outdoor garden but spend little to no time actually tending it. I feel this kind of user might be better served by something like Aerogarden.
In any case, it's a much harder problem because watering even a small garden takes a _lot_ of water, so for it to be practical, you either need a robot with a huge (and very heavy) reservoir, or a base station at which it can fill up (which would almost certainly require leaving the garden bed itself, massively complicating the whole system).
It would have to be a much stronger robot to haul around a garden hose. Those things can easily weigh several kilograms when they're full of water, not to mention they can get caught on obstructions rather easily.
But I don't get it why they won't make the robot reverse a short bit and try to go around instead of just rolling over and die.
That would solve 99% of the situations I have rescued my old Roomba and current Neato from. It's very seldom they actually got something entangled in their brushes.
I doubt it could be that hard to detect an unusually low rotation speed. Now it seems to chug until it really stalls. Instead it should stop the brushes immediately and retreat, then retry with just the fan running.
the robot doesn't necessarily need to do all the work, just identify what needs to be done beyond its specialty
Mulch worked for me but I am using pots at the moment.
My garden was literally only weeds (our house is my wife's grandparents and the house had sat mainly abandoned for about 3 years when we moved in). After doing the newspaper and mulch technique and leaving it for about 6 weeks the weeds had all decomposed into soil and haven't come back.
Those things are hard though, plugging a few sensors into a Pi, slapping a LAMP stack on it then creating a web interface and smart-phone app you can show the VCs is easy by comparison.
slapping a LAMP stack on it then creating a web interface
Food security is important, and a robot that can selectively clip and gouge weeds can do the same to both critical food and cash crops too.
Furthermore, simple competition, big corporate espionage and personal differences can still affect small organic growers as well. Human factors are real, and novelty is good but it doesn't cure quite everything.
The future gets scary fast when you consider the almost inevitable tick-tock between capability/defense.
Someone somewhere is working out how to weaponise them, we've as a species weaponised everything else we've ever invented pretty much.
we have domesticated every weapon we have created for peaceful purposes.
I think George Carlin nailed it with his routine about flamethrowers.
> The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.
I think a lot of techies would be surprised what all that stuff costs as well.
Would be straight out of sci-fi.
Robot horticulture has long been a staple.
Considering how wrong they were on other important matters the battery explanation could easily be wrong and the CPU correct.
I'm paraphrasing, but Neo says "that's impossible (in reference to the Matrix) since it violates the laws of thermodynamics"
To which Morpheus replies "and where did you learn about the laws of thermodynamics?"
If you're in the Matrix, your knowledge of the Matrix would come from the Matrix itself which would have a bias towards falsifying information to preserve itself.
What will all these people do once farmers are unnecessary?
There aren't that many people working on farms in developed countries. In the US, only around 3 million people (or <1% of the total population) work on a farm. [0]
In other countries where many people are involved in agriculture, the pending industrialisation/automation of farming will probably have a similar impact to what happened in North America and Europe over the 20th century: more people will move to urban areas and add value to the economy in other ways.
[0] https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resou...
The answer is "whatever they want". The big problem facing governments everywhere right now is how to jump over the little gully of poverty that comes right after the change to get there.
One other thing I've read is that annual plants were the easiest plants to domesticate because the short life cycle results in faster evolution. However perennials are likely way less environmentally destructive.
For large surfaces would that financially make any sense though?
That may be a use case, but the large majority of grown food is not organic-certified. Does it make sense for such productions?
No plowing, no pesticides, just preventive coverage and good tools.
In the long run, those large monocultures don't make sense anyway.
Robots can be great for a lot of high maintenance, Human intensive, high value cultures such as fruits, greens ...
I guess they could also help expand vegetables farms to non cultivated areas, in some autonomous ways.
However they have many disadvantages:
Cost - $500 worth of fuel for the tractor vs $250 for chemical + $50 for fuel to run the sprayer is the big one (These cost numbers are what I've heard but I might remember wrong).
CO2: that $500 worth of fuel vs $50 directly translates into CO2, which in turns translates into global warming. (this is the only one that you can argue doesn't have a financial impact on the farmer - and it isn't clear that those arguments are valid)
Soil disturbance. Every time you til the soil you disturb the natural soil. It isn't as bad as deep plowing, but it is still harmful.
Soil compaction. A repetitively light sprayer can cover 100+ feet of crop in just two tire tracks (the first wheel the runs over the ground does the damage, the second barely adds anything so the 4 wheels result in two tracks). A tractor is heavier (the impact of weight it not linear though so figure 10% worse), and can only do 30 feet so you end up with just over 3x as many tire tracks compacting and harming the ground.
Labor cost. Sprayers can run at 15mph in the field. Cultivators are probably running at 5mph. Not only are you taking 3x as many passes, each pass takes 3x as long. You pay the operator by the hour.
Now for your robot which applies? The weed pulling robot will only disturb the soil where the weed is. However the robot needs to get to the weed which increases compaction along each row.
My guess is farmers will spray everything as a primary prevention. Then they will fly drones over the field and send a robot down only the rows where there are weeds. That is just a guess though, you can imagine your own parameters for future robots which will change everything.
Note, herbicides are not nearly as dangerous as popular press makes them out to be.
You must not be familiar with modern farming. Most farmers do no till these days. They never plow - ever. The first seven years of no till they do see less yields than their counterparts that plow, but after that the advantage of non-distributed soil mean they get better yields. (more profit ever before we account for the fact that plowing uses a lot of expensive fuel)
Nothing is simple, but there is a reason most farms and all the big ones are no or limited till.
Just mapping out the ivy infestation with drones and image recognition software would be impressive. There's enough room for a quad-rotor to move around in theory, but it would have to have some pretty sophisticated obstacle avoidance algorithms.
Developing, manufacturing, and operating a crew of robots just for this one particular ivy problem wouldn't be worth the cost, but invasive species are a widespread problem and are sometimes on much larger scales, like hundreds or thousands of square miles. At some point, using people isn't a realistic option. If we can solve larger invasive species problems for less money than a human work crew, then that seems like a win.
1) Getting very close to the crops and intertwining with them to make weeding very hard
2) Looking almost exactly like real crops (as-in, to the point where most humans can't tell the difference and the machines need to start taking genetic samples)
You're totally right though; the machines have an adaption-speed advantage, so I'd expect this to be a very effective technique overall (assuming that the robotics pan-out).
I'm sure that gene was always there; but billions of mowings over a century of lawn care means its present everywhere. Simple selection?
Plants can't move around so they evolved to deal with a really wide range of environments and stuff eating them etc.
Its a different growth pattern in the plant. Gotta be driven by genetics.
Further, it's not just the stem involved, if your mowing regularly your taking out the leaves.
PS: There are also a few different plants that all look similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dandelion
Mendel should have used dandelions for his gene studies, there is lots more to see!
https://news.uoguelph.ca/2014/04/high-school-students-study-...
By the time any evolutionary affects are seen, if at all, of weeds being pulled by ML, ML will have progressed far beyond where it is now, likely well beyond what could be fooled by simple diversity.
Another kind of bot I am hoping to see is a waste collector. They would find plastic bottles, bags, glass and iron in forests, on roadsides, and even underwater, around beaches. Unleash 100 bots in a forest and in one year, it's pristine. We can also have some collect floating plastic from the oceans.
to go through landfills and mine for recyclables ...
the list goes on.
> "Some 15 million of them are cleaning floors all over the planet, and they’re doing so reliably and affordably and autonomously enough that people keep on buying them"
It is absolutely not "reliable". It's barely better than cleaning the floor myself. Some days, cleaning the floor myself would actually be easier, or ends up being what I have to do anyway. The number of issues I've run into with the damned thing is absurd and I feel like they should be fixing those before making a new product.
I think people are for the most part getting tricked into buying these. They're not that great.
My anecdata: we've had three since 2009, the earlier ones cleaned well but got dirt inside and eventually stopped working after 2 years. Our latest one bought 3 years ago seems better designed and more reliable, zero problems so far. Ours runs 2-3 times a week, mostly on wood and linoleum floors, and fills up with pet hair and dirt each time. We don't fiddle with the IR barriers, we just put a box in a doorway if we don't want it to roam, and we don't worry about docking, we just pick it up wherever it stops, empty it and dock it manually. Overall, it does a good job of getting most of the dirt in an area, but there is still the need to do a deeper clean once a month. Not affiliated, just a satisfied customer.
1. It occasionally doesn’t properly return to the home base, because it’s hard to find a good place for the home base where it can’t be moved/knocked over accidentally. This happens maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks, and is just a mild annoyance: you just need to carry the Roomba to its home base yourself.
2. After 3 years of usage, the battery died in such a way that it emptied rapidly enough for the Roomba to not be able to return to the home base. This was easily fixed by installing a new battery.
I recently upgraded to the Roomba 980, and it seems to work better than the 780 — it cleans more quickly and returns to its home base more reliably. Also, less cleaning required due to a different brush design.
Overall, I feel that I’m definitely getting my money’s worth out of the product, and it’s doing a great job at vacuuming. YMMV, but for me, it’s great.
>Say $30 an hour
Depends on where you live. Around here (CE Europe) I get cleaning service for ~5$/h (~15$ for 3 hours of work once a week).
Can I personally clean the foors better? Yes. Can I personally clean my dishes better? Yes. Dishwasher sometimes turns things upside down, doesn't clean properly etc.
But the main reason is that it saves me a lot of time, and it's good enough for me. Maybe not for you.
It's not replacing a normal vacuum, anyone who thinks so is fooling themselves. It's to keep your house cleaner in between normal deep cleans.
But our Roomba was a miracle worker when my wife was laid up in bed for 6 months with a shattered pelvis and I was also extremely sick. And while I know how, and have time, to weed my garden, this robot could help people who don't have the time or energy to keep up with such thing. And the stories don't even have to be that dramatic - in a family with 5 kids, there are better ways to spend time than vacuuming carpets.
Sometimes having devices like this isn't about the quality of the work - it is just about the work getting done at all, so your time can be spent on more important things.
The whole comment seems bizarre to me. It's like some strange gardening pretension.
http://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532879755/a-pesticide-a-pigwee...
Mom fights a never ending battle with foreign weeds like knapweed (from eastern Europe) and Canadian thistle (from southeast Europe and Asia) that was introduced thru contaminated seeds. Every year she sprays and manually digs the weeds out of the ground.
Edit: also should point out that what we call weeds push out the local plantlife too. I also forgot kudzu, the weed that (or didn't? depends who you ask) ate the south.
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/05/04/the-vine-that-ate-...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/true-story-kudz...
As they say in botany class, a wildflower is just a weed with a better PR department.
Once a gardener decides to keep a plant, they're not weeds any more.
To make it worse, those other three columns of links to other articles contain animated gifs, really dragging attention away from the actual content.
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Vigoro-3-ft-x-50-ft-Polyethylene-...
The previous owner of my house used a ton of it as a quick solution to a weed problem so they could more easily sell the house. I've spent a lot of time ripping out their quick fix. I had a nice surprise of finding a bed of sad irises under one.
After his earlier comments about fancy sensors being too expensive I was surprised to read this. But I agree. Once some cheap neural net ASICs come out I expect a revolution in robotics will follow soon after.
You'd need to spend nearly $109,000 per acre and that is a pretty small vegetable commercial farm. In fact ten acres would probably be the minimum for one family to make a living and you'd spend over a $1 million!
You can hire a whole lots of high school kids every year for a whole lot less money. Doesn't mean it isn't cool technology, but then again so is a $450,000 Ford GT.
Still believe that commercial herbicides will soon be an endangered species. Didn't get many farmers to agree with me twenty years ago but maybe more would now.
edit: Though I suppose there will still need to be distinctions made to make clear the differences between GMO varieties such as BT corn and the like. However, maybe by then the definition of organic will widen to allow for the incredible advancements that genetic engineering allows us.
Once a majority of produce and fruit can be classified as organic from a chemicals PoV labor intensity may become a point of distinction in order to fetch a better price in the marketplace (I say that as someone who typically supports /buys/ organics).
Moreover, a megafarm would like to grow the latest and greatest in crop genetics, bred for standard beauty. Small farms are better able to grow the varieties that have been around decades, taste better, and are less perfect and ship poorly or are only exciting to a few people. Or, small farms can grow the newest small-breeder varieties bred for flavor or amazing exotic looks: I'm a big fan of Wild Boar Farms' new tomato introductions, but most people would never buy a mostly-black or an outrageously striped tomato.
The freshness point, I would contend that vertical urban/sub-urban farming could potentially deliver better with regard to some fresh produce and some fresh fruit/berries --not all, obviously, but many of the best selling items --better because they can grow more with more uniform product. The qualifier is potentially, if economics work out.
Obviously harvests which require large trees are out of the question --you can't commercially grow a mango grove or apple orchard in a vertical farm.
It's a bizarre future, but I guess we're already seeing people pay 25x for a hand bag if they know it was made in a conflict-free village or something of that nature. I suppose its only natural that our abundance will begin to allow us to start making those sorts of luxury designations for our food as well.
However, the main point is some farmers will find some kind of marketable distinction bigger operations won't be able to leverage (labor intensity or small production varietals "heirloom", etc.) Something which would allow them to fetch a better price and make them viable as a business)
You'd still have a need for insecticides although GMO's continue to reduce the need. But there's awesome potential for agchemical sales to go down and I say that as a former salesman of them.
Of course, with sufficiently liberated AI, you might find the definition of "pest" drifting... ;-)
This guy invented the Roomba? He must have been really screwed by iRobot if he has to do a Kickstarter to fund his next project. He should either have enough money or the reputation to talk to VCs.
Just like this news article showed. Guy with this idea? MEH. Inventor of the Roomba? Let's write it up!
Why would he give up money when he has the best marketing he can't buy? (cheaply)
The "goal" on KickStarter is set as US$ 120,000 (at this moment it reached more than double that US$ 265,213).
So he asked to receive between 108,000 and 110,000 US$ (net of the Kickstarter fee of 5% and of the additional - absurd BTW - "payment fee between 3 and 5%).
This can be a rather large or a ridicoulosly small amount (of course it depends on points of view) but I propend for the "ridicolously small".
A (hopefully) succesfull robotics engineer in his fifties should have (or can procure through relations) that amount of money easily, and he is "only" a co-founder (and CTO) of the new company.
It seems to me - I have noticed it on other projects that ask for otherwise senselessly small amounts of financing - that Kickstarter is used only to give some visibility to the product/invention.
Seen this way the 10,000-12,000 US$ (financed by crowd BTW) are more "advertising expenses" than anything else, and even if at the end Kickstarter gets (thanks to the higher level of founding contributions) double of that, it is still peanuts for the amount of visibility it provides.
Tilling seems like something that would be pretty challenging though. The whole "weed/not weed" thing has a lot of interesting questions around it. I always thought something that would keep your driveway and sidewalk clear of snow would be the next bit opportunity to automate.
Roundup is about as safe is it comes - common vinegar is more toxic.
Relevant Times Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roundup...
Unfortunately I do not think that peer review is incorruptible either. It is certainly important and speaks more for credibility, but especially in a case like this where there is so much money involved, personally I'm still waiting to see more information. I mean those emails just came out a few months ago, who knows what else will be found at this point?
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-monsanto-herbicide-glyphos...
They make agricultural robots for easing farming. They have a bunch of robot to remove weed
Insert "Not Hotdog" joke here, but having a wifi connection to the cloud where heavy-duty weed classification software could be run would keep the device costs low.
[1] http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?i...
Actually I would like to insert here that time the connection was down for half an hour and the thingy eradicated all aunt Julia's plants, and it's not a joke (at least according to aunt Julia, who didn't laugh at all).
The book refers to a website that seems to have been domain squatted by GoDaddy. An alternate .net tld is present, but unfortunately uses old Java applets. [2]
Not to mention that the worst weeds also spread horizontally
Non organic farms spray.
Home gardeners apparently aren't mulching, which has myriad other benefits besides weed control. I love robots, but mulch is a much better solution.
For reference, 75 yards of wood chips (3 tractor trailer loads) + bobcat rental to spread costs $1000 in Bay Area. And provides years or weed prevention, water retention, and soil improvement.
Yeah.. wow. Stop by a Home Depot sometime next spring and observe the mountains of bagged mulch they stock. Home gardeners and hobby farmers do indeed mulch. A lot. Where I am they stack mulch between gas pumps at every station. If that's too much trouble a single call will have a truckload on your property inside a week.
Simple weed killing robots of the sort depicted here will find their home on lawns. We're not all living in a coastal desert; ample fresh water affords nice lawns and that means squabbling with weeds.
It has huge benefits for water retention, weed prevention, as well as providing carbon to be broken down by the soil life which will improve your soil over time.
The idea of weeds is a tragic fallacy. There are some "weeds" that are selling for up to $15/lb (nettles, lambs quarter). Most weeds are beneficial for cooking and herbal medicine. And most any weed can have some kind of beneficial role in the garden.
Same thing goes for "pests". One plant's pest is another plant's companion.
Yet people are all but obsessed with exterminating misunderstood creatures from their local ecosystems. In my view, this robot is not so far off in the grand scheme of things from a robot that goes around killing other animals and even people, based on shallow, superficial misunderstandings of another being's potential.
I wish as much engineering effort went into understanding as it does into stuff like this.
Heck, I pull volunteer flowers from my flower bed if they don't jibe with this years' layout. Its not about what's a 'weed'. Its about what I want in this here bed, and what I want in that one over there.
But weeding as an act of moderate human selection isn't what irritates me. It's peoples' blind acceptance of an entire false taxonomy of "good" vs "bad" plants/organisms. It's dualistic and dangerous in the long run. It's stupidity posed as common sense. It's a kind of eugenics that's directed not just at humans but at entire ecologies.
Right now what Monsanto is doing with chemical resistant plants is unconscionable. The glyphosate scheme is obscene. It's worse than some skynet extermination program. In the midst of a massive loss of the earth's sustaining biodiversity, we have unchecked corporate powers playing out obscene world domination plans. The stakes are too high. Why do people feel so nonchalant about the Roundup scheme? Why do we eat their corn? Cause they're only killing weeds.
There's a massive extinction happening right now. What are we doing? Programming robots to decrease biodiversity.
I heard someone, a successful ecologist or chef or landscape artist I believe, once say their parents wouldn't let them pick a weed unless they could identify it.
That struck me as a truly brilliant idea. I think it also helps combats that fallacy you've pointed out.