Robots fight weeds in challenge to agrochemical giants | Hacker News Reader

Robots fight weeds in challenge to agrochemical giants

reuters.com

35 pointsrmason18 comments

While it's nice that the robo-gardener is going to reduce pesticide use by being more precise in its spraying, it might be even better if the thing could be given a gripper to just yank out the offending sprout before it gets out of control.

Chuck it on the dirt and let it whither in the sun (since the bot is solar powered). The nutrients will return to the soil on the next rain.

It would be cool to see a herd of maybe 50 of these weed-picking robots ambling through a field.

A weed on the dirt would likely grow in the new spot, and gripping is tricky. But to your point, what about just a spike or hammer or blade to just mash the weed? More simple than a grip.

Plants can be weirdly resilient to smashing -- various bits of plant fragments can decide to grow new roots.

Chuck the weed in a barrel and take it away somewhere to be killed. Apparently a compost pile will kill weeds (and their seeds) if at a hot enough temperature long enough.

You could also heat it in place. Propane is not really a pesticide, but it works nicely. An electric arc should also work nicely, even burning out the root.

When I got started in the fertilizer business some farmers used to just band spray herbicides cutting two thirds of the cost. Then they would mechanically rip out the rest of the weeds using a cultivator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivator

What hurt cultivators was it needed to be done timely and the more acres farmed it became difficult to hit that window so it fell out of use. But what if a robot did the cultivation? It would only have to identify the crop and stay down the center of row, plus it could operate 24 hours a day. I'm not certain why that's a more difficult task than selectively spraying chemicals?

That's really agreat idea. If they utilized solar they could run the thing for next to nothing.

I would hope that is the eventual goal...but even if the ceiling is precision spraying, the net benefit of it's use could be huge. This is legitimately one of the best things I've heard in a long time.

There's already an effort to do something along those lines, not sure if it could be scaled up though:

https://www.franklinrobotics.com

Is maddening use of the english language like "reduce pesticide use by 20 times" a part of some big-name style guide now?

I can't remember the last time I've seen a major publication phrase a reduction in a way that makes sense. Things like "Reduce by 95%" or "require 1/20th of the pesticide" seem to be stricken by copy editors in favor of nonsensical multiplication.

Not all public is as math-literate as you.

I find it just as maddening as you do. But I have to concede to the descriptivists that it’s clear and unambiguous in context, as well as being in common use.

I don't find it clear at all. 20 times what? All I get out of that is that whatever reduction is happening is probably big because I'm not context blind, but then again it could be a 20 x .000001% reduction. When saying X is 20 times larger that is unambiguous, it just means 20X. When something is being reduced 20 times what does that mean? X - something20?? X-20? X/20?

"Reduce X by 20 times" means that X becomes X/20.

I read it as a shorthand for "reduce by a factor of 20" -- crucially, I believe `x` is meant to represent `⨉` (the multiplication symbol), as opposed to `𝓍` (a scalar variable).

The reason it drives me crazy is that I can't help but read it as being equivalent to multiplying by -19 (particularly when it's phrased like "such and such is now 20x less foobarish"). But even I have to concede that it clearly doesn't mean that.

It's not universally clear from context, though; the literal reading is tenable in any case where a negative final value isn't inherently ludicrous, so it's ambiguous in at least that case. And I've often seen it used in that case.

The peculiar usage is “clear” as an idiom that conflicts with the individual meanings of the component words iff the speaker and listener are aware of the idiom and treat the idiomatic reading as overriding the natural reading.

Moreover, the idiom is supported by, and only intuitive as the inverse of, a usage which is itself both literally incorrect and never disambiguated from the literal meaning by context, specifically, the use of “N times larger” to mean what is literally meant by “N times as large” rather than its natural literal meaning of “N+1 times as large”.

It should be decibels. We get a 13 dB pesticide reduction.

Neat tech. And, perhaps validated by John Deere's acquisition of Blue River last September for $284million-- $193 million being goodwill!

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