Farms are designed to be serviced by farm vehicles. A vehicle makes a lot of sense.
Polyculture farming could become much more economically feasible if drones could weed out all non-whitelisted species.
Would also be a great boon to forestry: would be awesome to make a bunch of drones to fly through forests and zap any non-native invasive species it sees.
Sure, but the weedkiller isn't the only vehicle that needs to work on the farm. I don't think flying drones are going to be ploughing any time soon.
Given the climate change it could be the other way around. Zap some native saplings, which can no longer thrive.
Yes, let's put powerful lasers on drones flown by AI. What could happen? I just hope the human recognition model doesn't shoot more of one race than another.
I'm not sure that's a great idea either, but flying brings more problems than it solves in this problem space.
Well, there are some robots that travel on aerial lines, typically used for cable inspection. Here's a quick search result: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robo...
And, hey, with unmanned drones over rural fields you won't get any Hindenburg disasters.
Both the drone and the ground robot would need milimiter precision geolocation to coordinate otherwise the laser can miss the weed.
Now for individual weeds you need precise aiming but that's only from a few feet away at max.
The overall geo location boils down to being able to track a row as you go down it and then go to the next row at the other end. The lasers don't care about the geo location at all.
A flying drone seems like the wrong way to solve the problem, though. For a drone close enough to the ground to reliably detect weeds, you'd likely need a multi-rotor, a slow flying fixed wing aircraft, or a blimp. A multirotor has a huge energy penalty, and a fixed wing aircraft or blimp loses the practical gains vs. just using a tractor of some sort.
A spider-carriage walking robot which could step around the valuable plants, climb steeper hills, and wouldn't dictate a row-and-plow approach to agriculture, that could be pretty compelling. Less soil compaction, more flexibility, could work inside forested regions as well. It has potential.
Also: no more chemical weed killers.
Do this with bugs, and get rid of insecticides as well.
But I think it might be possible to focus sunlight to generate energy to kill weeds, not through battery or generated electricity.
If the camera sees the correct spectra for a known weed it can drop down and get a closer inspection then mark the spot or just burn the weeds with an attached laser.
I assume the crawler is necessary because--in order for the laser to work--the weeds need to be identified very early as they emerge from the ground. You might not be able to spot them at such an early stage from above without expensive optics.
Now there is opportunity to have one long wire that the tractor reels in/out as it makes passes. This isn't a flying drone, but that isn't really needed for anything other than cool.
You don't need wires to be that rigid for that.
I’m not sure why people are inventing more complicated solutions when this robot seems to handle the job quite well without them. It covers 20 acres in a day, you can likely keep 100+ acres weed free continuously without any other special gimmicks.
There are already solutions that use drone photogrammetry to map crop health, ground coverage and so on. It feels like a logical next step to use a drone to assist mapping the best route/find problem areas to target for the weed-roomba.
That's a ridiculous solution to a non-existent problem. The robot literally has no rush to go to the weeds. It can crawl along the field by itself 24/7. Throw in a solar panel charging station and you literally have free energy for it to piss away.
Instead you want to add complexity to the setup, increase maintenance costs and potentially shorten the lifespan of the system.
If it covers all your land in under a day, sure. If not, then route planning may mean you can have one rather than two or more of these very expensive machines.
It's not a drasticly complex addition, and mapping weeds with drones appears to be a use of them already.
This assumes weeding is a time sensitive task, which I find very doubtful. Realistically covering your land area in a week is probably enough, but maybe that's much higher.
If sending a 20 pound gas drone with a 2 TB solid-state drive and 60 FPS 4K camera on it up and down the field for one 100th of the fuel consumption once a week saves 500 hours a year off that beast, it’d probably be worth it.
This true of any modern farming equipment, which is why planting strategy is so critical--I kept messing up in my first year as I was going way too fast instead of taking my time and my planted rows were never straight, it was in a green house and we had an old diesel tractor so my lungs were hurting after the first hour and I just compromised on that aspect.
But then when I had to go back and weed, maintain and eventually harvest the oddly planted fields of salads and potatoes I made sure to follow the natural ebb and flow of the soil compaction, which was there even after it was tilled.
What I'm saying is that the compacted soil can help you in later seasons to maintain the direction of growth so it's not entirely a bad thing to have. And unless you farmed the same fields for several seasons/years you would overlook this as a net benefit. Eventually seasoned farm hands can do it while drinking and smoking and just listening to how the engine is struggling without even touching the steering wheel, they can even get out of the tractor and walk ahead of it as it's crawling forward to check if everything is fine. Where as for apprentices like myself who had no real experience in Ag it was a remarkable discovery that one shouldn't overlook.
Also, drones are already widely in use; they monitor temperature and moisture in real time and a offer other services right now [0]. Their is a company that I found that posted here on YC a few years ago that offers this as a service [1].
I was actually going to get my commercial drone's license a couple month's before I retired as a farm manager in Hawaii due to extensive injuries, but my fintech startup required saving and scraping all my pennies to afford getting it off the ground. I might consider getting it again as things start to be more widely deployed and the costs keep coming down and I still would like to be involved in some capacity in Ag.