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Comment by goda90 | Hacker News Reader

I kind of want to try something like this for garden weeding. Put a small spinning blade instead of a grabber arm on it. Computer vision can identify any weeds popping up and it'll go over and cut them before they get too big/woody for the blades. The challenge would be dodging taller plants and probably the forces that the blade would put on it.

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I think the project difficulty grows at least 10x with all the dust, insects wind, pollen in the air and whatnot even assuming you hide it for bad weather and you have secured very stable mount points. It sure would be cool though.

Some 12ft T-post, shelter for it to park, update weak points were dust & water can intrude. I think it's doable.

The more I think about, I wonder if a small tethered ground robot paired with an overwatch camera would be better. Cable management could still be in the air but since it's just power delivery, it doesn't need the tension.

It would be interesting if you could just have all the motors hidden on the sides and have even the "cut" functionality driven by a cable getting pulled.

Why not use grippers to pull them? Probably more effective because there's no root to grow back from, shouldn't require too much force when they're small/the soil is damp, and you don't have to figure out torsion/"friendly fire" from a spinning blade.

A small spinning blade? Sounds like the type 1 robots from Screamers https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/

I wonder if you could make it work vertically. It might ease the geometric challenges.

Naively, spraying targeted roundup from above or cutting a circle around the stem to kill roots kind of thing.

Roundup is gross anywhere even in small amounts. If water and energy can be provided similarly to stringman, a heating element to deliver a small payload of boiling water usually suffices.

I am picturing a drone, one with the fan at the bottom :) OR one that can do a roadster maneuver at the right time.

Edit: Isn't there already one that Zap's weed with a laser?

weeds, dog poop, etc. could be useful in your yard.

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