Farm robots inspired by ant brains

techxplore.com

25 points·wglb··6 comments

> The River LettuceBot scans crop geometry and ensures optimal growth and minimal > pesticide usage by distinguishing between weeds and product as it thins overly > crowded vegetable crops. This prevents oversaturation and disease.

I hope tools like this can replace the extensive pesticide usage we currently have. If the energy usage and price per unit gets low enough, you could probably amortize the cost over multiple years and pay less than for buying pesticides every year.

Tools to replace pesticides? You mean something like robotic cats catching mice? :) I mean, focusing on biodiversity preservation would be probably more impactful.

I dream of robots capable of weeding, replacing herbicides, and selectively pruning/mulching to reduce fertilizer usage.

I dream of learning systems for best practices for multi-crop growing patterns to maximize output and minimize risk while preserving or helping to maintain local ecosystems.

ML for permaculture, basically.

IMO it makes a lot more sense to let nature run its course on a curated system than to force a system to oppose nature's tendencies with complicated additions.

See, this is the stuff I want to do with ML/AI, not getting more people to click on ads or internal document retrieval systems. This is cool and useful.

Fun fact: In the sci-fi book “Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, computing is performed by networked ant colonies.

Holy comma splice, Batman

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