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Comment by hanniabu | Hacker News Reader

> The whole point of this thing is to let it run all day killing weeds while you do other stuff.

There's a lot of automated tractors now

I guess I don't follow what the advantage would be. Putting hours and wear/tear on a $250k tractor that you likely have other uses for in order to cut what? $10k off the price of this for the cummins motor and hydraulics? It would need power generation of some sort, so you'd be doing PTO off the tractor instead to drive a generator.

I'd imagine the end result would be more fuel and in the long run more expense.

The advantage with tractor-pulled is lower cost and higher reliability. The propulsion, guidance, and power-supply problem has been dealt with by industry already and is already owned by the farmer. The autonomous weeding machine will undoubtedly have issues with these three functions, which means down-time and cost. The machine would be cheaper if tractor-pulled, and the developers could focus on the problem at hand. Also, the tractor driver could periodically stop to monitor and tweak the weed killer, especially important given the new technology. We did a recent project with a farming implement that could have been autonomous, and when one is realistic with reliability and maintenance costs (unless one intends a McDonald's ice-cream machine repair business model) then the argument for tractor-pulled is very strong.

100% agree and that's what my original comment was trying to get at.

I can see selling two models, one autonomous, one three point hitch / PTO. The advantage of the latter is clear to me.

But then the product starts to look a lot less sci-fi, doesn't it? We already have pull-behind weed burners that use propane torches and not lasers. The only "magic" would be in the AI recognition systems (which I have questions about.) Perhaps one could not get investment $$ for it then :-(

Also propane torches seem more efficient to me than converting diesel combustion to electricity to heat energy.

I think the difference is that propane torches are an imprecise mechanism generally used to clear dead area between planted rows, while this laser based solution could be used selectively within a planted row (provided it is real at all).

Fully agreed about the 3-point comment though. Why take on building an autonomous tractor AND a targeted weed-killer, rather than tackling the differentiating problem only? Seems like a hype train measure. Or the systems integration is very important, in which case a partnership would be the obvious route or white-labeling an autonomous tractor. Regardless, this strategy seems very weird to me too.

Right, which is why I think it's likely a result of VC direction. It's not enough to have a profitable or sensible product, it has to be something that can sell in acquisition for 10 or 100 x the investment given.

"Autonomous vehicles are hot and AI is hot, go with that."

Yes, but autonomous vehicles with AI don't scale at zero cost like web apps, so the valuation shouldn't have the same multiplier.

>The advantage with tractor-pulled is lower cost and higher reliability.

Based on what? The cummins engine they're using is bulletproof and a rounding error in the cost of the unit. Hydraulic motors will run for 10s of thousands of hours without any maintenance beyond a fluid change.

People in this thread keep claiming tractors are fully autonomous, which model? If they aren't fully autonomous, what farmer is volunteering to spend hundreds to thousands of hours in their tractor doing nothing but putting along at 5mph stop-and-go while this thing zaps weeds?

https://www.protocol.com/john-deere-farming-ai-autonomous

My theory is JD,Case already have the tech to be level 4 autonomous but they haven't figured out how to make more revenue than selling $250K quad-tracs with 'some' autonomy.

https://thinkingagriculture.io/the-agriculture-unicorn-hidin...

Thousands... millions of farmers already putting along doing nothing but dragging a cultivator / sprayer / fertilizer spreader / bush hog / rototiller / weed badger / manure spreader etc. etc.

I assume you haven't farmed? You don't run any of those implements at 5mph with a 3-row spread. It would literally be impossible to run a modern farm at those speeds and spread.

Yeah. But I wonder if putting it all in one was for better coupling between shooting laser control vs the whole cart moving around (for example, slowing down/stopping when the weed density goes up).

I noticed this thing uses hydraulic drive motors... I assume that was so they could run the engine as 'electrical first', but I also wonder if it gives them better start/stop control of the cart.

Many tractors these days are hydraulic as well.

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