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Not OP, but my take on this is efficiency and quality will be superior to a human (or will be very, very soon).

Speed of movement / detection / destruction cycle isn't as important as cost per unit of land patrolled - these are things you can easily scale up if the price per device is low enough. Compare & contrast cost of humans.

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Right now the dwell time of the laser is slow like in the order of a second per weed. And there can be hundreds of weeds per square metre. So this needs to improve — and there’s lots of good ways to improve it. However, as the parent says, just leave a few bots out there and you easily compete with human operator cost.

Right, but one weed per second is already better than humans if for no other reason it's effectively continuous.

And regular sweeps means you won't be seeing hundreds of weeds per square metre, certainly not once the primary crop's established.

I recall the Bosch weed-stamper robot from a few years ago were pretty happy with ~ 2 weeks per second stomping rate.

/me nods

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