Robot KOs Weeds Into Submission

Robots do play a rather crucial role in humanity – especially in the production and manufacturing industries, and more improvements as well as modifications to robots will even enable them to be more energy efficient. Bosch has a rather interesting giant robot that actually punches weeds to death – which is a far greener solution to get rid of them weeds as opposed to using pesticide.

Bosch startup Deepfield Robotics talked about their “Vision-Based High-Speed Manipulation for Robotic Ultra-Precise Weed Control” recently, which is an enormous agricultural robot that will be smart enough to autonomously detect weeds – and then physically obliterate those individual weeds in a matter of a tenth of a second. I suppose you can say that this is one “boxing robot” that would make Muhammad Ali proud.

Rather than going through the time consuming method of physically removing weeds in order not to harm our environment with more pesticides, it seems that smashing those weeds into the ground might be a better proposition. The stamping tool itself measures 1cm wide, where it will drive weeds about 3cm into the soil, and when tested on a carrot crop that features carrots spaced approximately 2cm apart with an average of 20 weeds per meter that decided to make their home rather close to the carrots, the BoniRob robot, as it is nicknamed, pummeled those weeds to death in double quick time without causing any damage to the carrot. [Press Release]

Edwin Kee
Categories: Robots
Tags: Science