California-based company FarmWise has developed autonomous machines that use AI to pull weeds while preserving crops, eliminating the need to use herbicides or hire more workers. FarmWise’s first robot, Titan, uses computer vision to distinguish weeds from crops while cutting weeds with inch-perfect precision. Its second robot, called Vulcan, was launched last February and is said to be more efficient than the first version. However, the company’s robots raise some concerns.
The population is growing, but we can’t expand the land or water we have, so we need to increase the efficiency of agribusiness dramatically. I think AI and data will play an important role in this evolution,” said Sebastien Boyer, co-founder of FarmWise. Indeed, in agriculture, weeds can strangle crops and destroy yields. And using herbicides to eradicate these invasive plants pollutes the environment and harms human health. In addition, there would not be enough workers to fight all the weeds by hand.
So FarmWise’s solution is to use autonomous AI-powered weeding robots to cut weeds while preserving the crop. FarmWise currently has two weeding robots: Titan and Vulcan. Both feature AI commanding hundreds of tiny blades to rip weeds around each crop without damaging healthy crops. The two robots also allow for human supervision while removing weeds. FarmWise’s latest robot, Vulcan, was unveiled at World Ag Expo in February.
According to Vulcan’s description, the robot has state-of-the-art computer vision. Using deep learning models refined by millions of images in the FarmWise catalog, Vulcan would be able to weed between rows and within rows with sub-centimeter accuracy, eliminating the need for manual weeding equipment for more than 20 vegetable crops, including lettuce and broccoli. The end result would be a cost effective, accurate and reliable weed control solution for vegetable crops. This could also counteract the labor shortage in agriculture.
According to some analysts, the need for automated alternatives to manual tasks like hand weeding has become a top priority for the vegetable industry amid skyrocketing costs and labor shortages. Vulcan would be the first row cultivator to offer a fully open architecture for high visibility and reliable weed control in all light conditions. According to the company, the operator can check the quality of the weeding simply by looking over his shoulder or via the FarmWise monitor in the cab.
It’s a minimalist user interface that also allows the operator to micro-adjust the blades for more precision. With Vulcan, FarmWise has announced a teleoperation program that guarantees live performance monitoring and remote support. Farmers would also have the opportunity to receive software updates, including updated crop models, to further improve the system. Vulcan’s design would allow it to be quickly moved in and out of fields and reconfigured to suit different configurations.
Weed arms can be added or removed in under 20 minutes. There are essentially three core technologies built into Vulcan: a state-of-the-art vision and lighting system, proprietary machine learning software trained on millions of crop images, and precision weed control. FarmWise CTO Garrick Kremesec says, “With Vulcan, we are establishing a formula for deploying precision machine vision in agriculture in the most reliable, clearest and easiest way possible.” These elements would enable Vulcan to create a big to offer scaled-up precision weed control.
It’s about precision. We will better understand what the planet needs and make wiser decisions about each of them. This will bring us to a point where we can use the same amount of land, much less water, almost no chemicals, much less fertilizer while still producing more food than we do today. That’s the order. That excites me,” Boyer said at MIT, where he earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science. According to him, FarmWise’s mission is to make AI as reliable a tool as GPS is in the agricultural industry today.
25 years ago GPS was a very complicated technology. You had to connect to satellites and do crazy calculations to find your position. However, a few companies have taken GPS to a new level of reliability and simplicity. Today every farmer in the world uses GPS. “We believe that AI can have an even greater impact on the agricultural industry than GPS, and we want to be the company that makes this technology available and easy to use for all farmers around the world,” Boyer said. But FarmWise’s technology raises some security concerns.
As more and more autonomous machines are introduced into the agricultural industry, experts warn of the sharply increasing risk of hacking automatic irrigation systems, drones and harvesting robots. In this case, critics ask what would happen if a threat actor took control of one or more Vulcan robots to destroy a field. The other concern with FarmWise robots relates to intellectual property. Some fear farmers are buying a tool they will never fully own.
They cite the case of John Deere tractors, where very often the company’s repair policy requires farmers to hack their own equipment in order to be able to repair it as expected. In fact, John Deere appears to have found a way to digitally diagnose faulty tractor parts, ensuring farmers are forced to turn to the company’s repair services. But many hackers have developed jailbreaks to allow farmers to repair their devices themselves. Many fear that FarmWise is experiencing the same problem.
According to them, this behavior negatively affects the yields of farmers. However, Tjarko Leifer, CEO of FarmWise said: “We are very excited to introduce Vulcan, our next generation weed control machine. It distills everything we’ve learned over the last three years serving our customers through our sales department and we look forward to putting it into the hands of our existing customers and new growers so they can add automated weed control to their operations .
Source: FarmWise
And you ?
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