Roomba Inventor Joe Jones on His New Weed-Killing Robot

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/roomba-inventor-joe-jones-on-weed-killing-robot

by sohkamyung • 9 years ago

221 223 9 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

Gibbon12• 9 years ago

I expect that one thing that will come out of deep learning is mechanical weeding for industrial level agriculture. Instead of spraying crops with herbicide, mechanically remove weeds. Bonus is agricultural machinery tends to be high capital cost anyways, which allows for a lot more processing power and sensors than a garden robot.

dsfyu404ed2• 9 years ago

No piece of equipment that will be used on a farm deserves more than the bare minimum of sensors.

sillysaurus3• 9 years ago

Sounds ripe for a shakeup.

justinpombrio• 9 years ago

Why?

tda• 9 years ago

I really hope we get there soon. Not only could this eliminate usage of herbicides, but many smaller autonomous robots vs one really big John Deere could also remove the need for monocultures. And that would really be a major improvement for both crop yields and the environment

noir_lord5• 9 years ago

Would be fantastic to sit and watch an army of spindly legged robots stride around the place doing that.

Would be straight out of sci-fi.

Robot horticulture has long been a staple.

puranjay3• 9 years ago

As someone who lives in a country where 55% of the population is involved in agriculture, it sounds more terrifying than wonderful.

What will all these people do once farmers are unnecessary?

bluGill5• 9 years ago

corn is a tall crop, soy beans are short. Farmers are already experimenting with things like 4 rows of corn 4 soybeans. The corn rows shade the soybean rows and so reduce yield - but in turn the soybeans are not shading the corn so they get slightly better corn yields. This is still experimental, but so far it looks promising.

Gibbon12• 9 years ago

I remember reading Indians of the Northeast planted corn, beans, and melons together. So switching to polycuture crops should have advantages.

One other thing I've read is that annual plants were the easiest plants to domesticate because the short life cycle results in faster evolution. However perennials are likely way less environmentally destructive.

deepGem• 9 years ago

There are some crude versions out there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBRZUtIDqbU I don't think any of them employ deep learning for visually recognizing weeds. This one from Bosch comes close I guess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8Aq6qVQOkw

dEnigma• 9 years ago

This one came as a recommendation after watching your second video: https://youtu.be/15tovWSnJe0

ekianjo2• 9 years ago

Instead of spraying crops with herbicide, mechanically remove weeds

For large surfaces would that financially make any sense though?

qq66• 9 years ago

If you are organic certified, and you could build something as fast and big as a combine harvester to remove weeds... why not?

Tempest1981• 9 years ago

A drone (or tractor) with high-powered lasers? Or a 10000 psi water stream?

bluGill5• 9 years ago

That depends. Farmers used to mechanically remove weeds with a cultivator. (a fancy hoe attached to a tractor) Those cultivators will remove all weeds and no weed grows resistant to them.

However they have many disadvantages:

Cost - $500 worth of fuel for the tractor vs $250 for chemical + $50 for fuel to run the sprayer is the big one (These cost numbers are what I've heard but I might remember wrong).

CO2: that $500 worth of fuel vs $50 directly translates into CO2, which in turns translates into global warming. (this is the only one that you can argue doesn't have a financial impact on the farmer - and it isn't clear that those arguments are valid)

Soil disturbance. Every time you til the soil you disturb the natural soil. It isn't as bad as deep plowing, but it is still harmful.

Soil compaction. A repetitively light sprayer can cover 100+ feet of crop in just two tire tracks (the first wheel the runs over the ground does the damage, the second barely adds anything so the 4 wheels result in two tracks). A tractor is heavier (the impact of weight it not linear though so figure 10% worse), and can only do 30 feet so you end up with just over 3x as many tire tracks compacting and harming the ground.

Labor cost. Sprayers can run at 15mph in the field. Cultivators are probably running at 5mph. Not only are you taking 3x as many passes, each pass takes 3x as long. You pay the operator by the hour.

Now for your robot which applies? The weed pulling robot will only disturb the soil where the weed is. However the robot needs to get to the weed which increases compaction along each row.

My guess is farmers will spray everything as a primary prevention. Then they will fly drones over the field and send a robot down only the rows where there are weeds. That is just a guess though, you can imagine your own parameters for future robots which will change everything.

Note, herbicides are not nearly as dangerous as popular press makes them out to be.

elihu2• 9 years ago

Another use case is invasive species control in parks and large public lands. As an example, Portland has a large park that stretches along a ridge-line for about ten miles, and it's getting overgrown by English ivy, which kills the trees. It's a big enough area that pulling it all by hand would be very expensive. Ivy-pulling robots would be pretty awesome, but it's a hard problem. Vegetation is thick and the terrain is everything but flat. You'd probably need some giant hexapods or something just to move around, and maybe some kind of Ivy-grabbing appendage.

Just mapping out the ivy infestation with drones and image recognition software would be impressive. There's enough room for a quad-rotor to move around in theory, but it would have to have some pretty sophisticated obstacle avoidance algorithms.

sitkack4• 9 years ago

Ivy growing over trees can be easily handled by humans.

drodgers3• 9 years ago

The best part? Weeds will still evolve resistance — just like they do for herbicides — but they'll do it by growing into shapes that the ML models misclassify.

zupa-hu• 9 years ago

Updating the robots can be done much faster than it takes for the weeds to mutate. And for mutations to happen, some proportion of the weed population must survive in the environment, as no weeds can not mutate. I doubt they have a chance, unless some species figure out how to live under the earth, in which case, we won't care as those would not be "weeds" any more.

ajuc• 9 years ago

There's already evolutionary advantage for weeds to look similar to crops.

nebabyte• 9 years ago

Are you forgetting that you're talking about two different processes that operate on orders-of-magnitude different durations?

By the time any evolutionary affects are seen, if at all, of weeds being pulled by ML, ML will have progressed far beyond where it is now, likely well beyond what could be fooled by simple diversity.

make32• 9 years ago

DL models can learn to classify hundreds of weed classes in less than a week. It takes centuries for a new breed/trait to appear. This is a very uneven race.

visarga3• 9 years ago

I envision a robot gardener that would create a paradise from a plot of empty land. Each plant would be placed, cared for and trimmed in such a way as to obtain an artistic effect.

Another kind of bot I am hoping to see is a waste collector. They would find plastic bottles, bags, glass and iron in forests, on roadsides, and even underwater, around beaches. Unleash 100 bots in a forest and in one year, it's pristine. We can also have some collect floating plastic from the oceans.

Balgair2• 9 years ago

A trash bot would really be something to see. I'd pay a lot in taxes for that. Add in some ML matrix-stirring to watch out for fauna, and you have taken out ~70% of forest rangers jobs. Heck, just make a Park Ranger bot, cleans trash, scolds tourists, takes entry fees, fights fires; it'd be pretty nice.

soperj• 9 years ago

Empty land?

agumonkey3• 9 years ago

Allow me for larger anticipation. Light and tiny electromechanical machines (aka cyborg insects) that can be released to monitor and clean weed, other insects, maybe bacterias.

JoeAltmaier8• 9 years ago

Genetically modified squirrels! They pull weeds, put them in a bin and get a kibble! Its work or die, which keeps the gene line pure. And self-replicating too.

nashashmi2• 9 years ago

Light and tiny electromechanical machines ...

to go through landfills and mine for recyclables ...

the list goes on.

lostlogin8• 9 years ago

If anyone hasn't seen the Black Mirror bees episode, please do. It's great.

davexunit2• 9 years ago

The term "weed" feels pretty outdated at this point. People consider many beneficial plants to be weeds just because they didn't put them there. For example, people remove clover, a wonderful nitrogen fixer, from their lawns in order to maintain their unsustainable monoculture of nonnative grass. Is a weed-killing robot solving the right problem? Modern agriculture works against nature rather than with it.

tengbretson5• 9 years ago

Agreed. I think the term undocumented cultivar is a more appropriate word to describe what these plants have to offer to us all.

lostlogin8• 9 years ago

... and the wall around your plants keeps them safe. Solar power pays for it all.

dpark3• 9 years ago

A weed is essentially any undesired plant that self propagates effectively. The fact that some of them are beneficial in some aspect is irrelevant if they are unwanted. The entire point of a garden is that it's full of stuff that some human wants.

reustle• 9 years ago

Their point is that if a clover is necessary for healthier vegetables, maybe the education around what weeds are should be fixed.

erickhill• 9 years ago

As shown in the video, plants you want to keep can be saved from the Turtle. 'Weed' is just a term people recognize as "something to remove from my lawn." If you want to save clover, that's a fixable problem. Which they fixed.

rabboRubble• 9 years ago

Weeds as the westerner farmer understands them to be are often transplanted from other parts of the world and without a natural predator, and can take over fields pushing out the crop.

http://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532879755/a-pesticide-a-pigwee...

Mom fights a never ending battle with foreign weeds like knapweed (from eastern Europe) and Canadian thistle (from southeast Europe and Asia) that was introduced thru contaminated seeds. Every year she sprays and manually digs the weeds out of the ground.

Edit: also should point out that what we call weeds push out the local plantlife too. I also forgot kudzu, the weed that (or didn't? depends who you ask) ate the south.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/05/04/the-vine-that-ate-...

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/true-story-kudz...

Alex3917• 9 years ago

The term "weed" feels pretty outdated at this point.

As they say in botany class, a wildflower is just a weed with a better PR department.

adrianmonk• 9 years ago

As far as I know, the term is fine. A plant you don't want is a plant that you don't want, regardless of whether you appreciate why you should want it.

andygates• 9 years ago

A seedling-removing bot (which is what this is) absolutely helps compared to chemical sprays or time-consuming faff.

Once a gardener decides to keep a plant, they're not weeds any more.

rmason3• 9 years ago

This looks like it would be fine for a homeowner that wants a garden but doesn't like to weed. But looking at it from the commercial standpoint it doesn't make much financial sense.

You'd need to spend nearly $109,000 per acre and that is a pretty small vegetable commercial farm. In fact ten acres would probably be the minimum for one family to make a living and you'd spend over a $1 million!

You can hire a whole lots of high school kids every year for a whole lot less money. Doesn't mean it isn't cool technology, but then again so is a $450,000 Ford GT.

Still believe that commercial herbicides will soon be an endangered species. Didn't get many farmers to agree with me twenty years ago but maybe more would now.

tengbretson5• 9 years ago

I imagine once this is made to fit into the row spacing of commercial row-crops, and purchased at scale, larger operations would be able to deploy these at a cost competitive with herbicide applications. And once it gets even within an order of magnitude of traditional herbicides, the implications for organic crops could be huge!

rmason3• 9 years ago

Agree with you more than you do yourself. Herbicide costs are rising while technology costs are declining. First use will be organic crops but I think it will make sense for non-organic ones as well.

pasbesoin• 9 years ago

I'm waiting for the precision laser targeting for pest control!

Of course, with sufficiently liberated AI, you might find the definition of "pest" drifting... ;-)

TulliusCicero2• 9 years ago

Doing it at commercial scale is probably a much harder problem. If they're successful for hobbyist gardeners for a while I'd expect them to then move up to bigger operations.

callalex2• 9 years ago

The Tesla Roadster was an objectively and subjectively poor car for the price, but it sure worked out well for them.

modeless2• 9 years ago

Currently I’m thinking that cameras connected to deep learning networks is the technology with the most promise to enable a new wave of low-cost robotic applications.

After his earlier comments about fancy sensors being too expensive I was surprised to read this. But I agree. Once some cheap neural net ASICs come out I expect a revolution in robotics will follow soon after.

melvinram• 9 years ago

An alternative outcome might be that sensor prices drop due to mass production with more adoption.

modeless2• 9 years ago

Cameras are pretty cheap and already mass produced like crazy. The expensive part is the processing you need to extract high level information from the pixels. That's why we need cheap neural net ASICs.

oh_sigh2• 9 years ago

I'm not sure if I understand your main thrust, but running data through a trained NN can be done in relatively few operations - it is training the network which takes a lot of compute resources.

oh_sigh2• 9 years ago

How long will weeds last if you keep decapitating them? I'd imagine they would deplete the soil even faster than just letting them grow(which brings it's own problems with shading out plants and propagation)?

djb_hackernews• 9 years ago

As a hobby gardener and wannabe roboticist I've thought a lot about this problem. Before I continue I love this thing and am seriously thinking about getting one.

However, a concern that I'm sure they've thought a lot about is in it's technique. I really only care about making sure there are no weeds within, say, 8 inches of my plants (or put another way, my level of concern about a weed is proportional to it's distance from my vegetable or flower plant). This looks like it will weed everything except the 8 inches around the plant. Never mind things like cucumbers that spread out on the ground and have important bits that are short and can't be contained by the wire protectors. Still, an exciting place to start.

prawn2• 9 years ago

It looks like they started with a Roomba and went from there, which leaves them with a robot that can't deal with raised beds or (as you said) weeds integrated with plants. I have raised beds and then raised side gardens which would render this device useless to me. Same with the other hobby gardeners I know.

I always imagined something with long spindly legs that would cut, inject or spray things that it identified as weeds by leaves. For me, the weeds that are the most trouble are those close to or mixed in with plants. Anything on its own isn't that hard to pull out.

cctan• 9 years ago

One workaround is that I hope that it can climb up and down slopes that lead to the raised beds.

Does it detect cliffs or edges and avoid falling down?

mikepurvis4• 9 years ago

I do raised beds as well, so I have the same concern. But from my point of view the larger issue is that I'm almost never only weeding. Like, it's just not that big of a job.

But more importantly, time spent "in the garden" includes a lot of inspection and minor adjustments to all kinds of things— move plants on a trellis, pinching suckers off the tomatoes, clipping blighted leaves off of plants, ensuring flowers are getting fertilized, monitoring fruit growth, etc.

All of this stuff is an essential part of being in tune with what's going on out there, and I'm not sure that having a robot do one small piece of it is beneficial. Basically, this product doesn't really look like it was built by a gardener— it looks like it was someone who had a solution they wanted to apply elsewhere, and spent 15 minutes watching a gardener at work, without really understanding what they were doing.

visarga3• 9 years ago

Watering would be a nice function as well. Many people don't want to bother with water pipes, so a bot that takes care of watering would be useful.

urethrafranklin• 9 years ago

My family kept a large garden for the duration of my childhood. I was made to weed it. It was absolutely that big of a job. It took a couple hours. Every day.

rangibaby2• 9 years ago

Easiest way to do it is to put layers of wet newspaper then black mulch. I left it for a month and it's as if the weeds were never there. I made holes in the mulch and planted some veges, they are doing great (except for the Shiso which something ate).

michaelbuckbee• 9 years ago

This is a great idea. Growing up my parents used black plastic on our fairly large garden. Black mulch seems much more aesthetically pleasing.

wil421• 9 years ago

You do know you can buy weed barrier fabric and cover the beds. When you plant you put holes in the barrier where your plant goes. Work well for a few people I know and it's similar price to mulching every season.

Mulch worked for me but I am using pots at the moment.

adolph• 9 years ago

The article pointed out the inventor's book, Robot Programming : A Practical Guide to Behavior-Based Robotics. [1] Are there any other interesting/recommended texts for this domain?

The book refers to a website that seems to have been domain squatted by GoDaddy. An alternate .net tld is present, but unfortunately uses old Java applets. [2]

1. https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0071427783/ref=rdr_ext_tub

2. http://www.behaviorbasedprogramming.net/manual.html

khrm• 9 years ago

Am I the only one who had to click to find out that weed being talk about isn't Marijuana?

snarfy• 9 years ago

I think the traditional solution (weed barrier) is still better, and cheaper.

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Vigoro-3-ft-x-50-ft-Polyethylene-...

pkulak• 9 years ago

Certainly not cheaper if you include installation.

stusmall• 9 years ago

I'm not a huge fan of landscape fabric. It works for a season or two but over time it forms holes that weeds push through. You still have to manually weed but now you are less likely to pull all the roots up.

The previous owner of my house used a ton of it as a quick solution to a weed problem so they could more easily sell the house. I've spent a lot of time ripping out their quick fix. I had a nice surprise of finding a bed of sad irises under one.

sapote• 9 years ago

Might work on the East Coast or in water-intensive gardens elsewhere, but in California almost any reasonable garden will have a layer of rough mulch to reduce evaporation (and suppress weeds). Maybe this robot could navigate my mulch but I'm doubtful.

rmrm5• 9 years ago

Commercial organic farms mulch heavily, which nicely controls weeds.

Non organic farms spray.

Home gardeners apparently aren't mulching, which has myriad other benefits besides weed control. I love robots, but mulch is a much better solution.

sitkack4• 9 years ago

Mulching robot?

rmrm5• 9 years ago

I am planning on getting 75 yards of wood chips delivered to mulch an orchard we are putting in. For me the mulching robot will be a bobcat I rent to help spread it :)

For reference, 75 yards of wood chips (3 tractor trailer loads) + bobcat rental to spread costs $1000 in Bay Area. And provides years or weed prevention, water retention, and soil improvement.

topspin• 9 years ago

> "Home gardeners apparently aren't mulching"

Yeah.. wow. Stop by a Home Depot sometime next spring and observe the mountains of bagged mulch they stock. Home gardeners and hobby farmers do indeed mulch. A lot. Where I am they stack mulch between gas pumps at every station. If that's too much trouble a single call will have a truckload on your property inside a week.

Simple weed killing robots of the sort depicted here will find their home on lawns. We're not all living in a coastal desert; ample fresh water affords nice lawns and that means squabbling with weeds.

rmrm5• 9 years ago

I was just responding to the video, which seems to clearly be an unmulched home garden. So I am assuming from their marketing that is the application they are targeting.

corpMaverick• 9 years ago

First time taking care of a gardern(Grass) How do I do that ? I have been pulling weeds with a weeder tool all summer.

rmrm5• 9 years ago

You can use cardboard or a few layers of newsprint to broadly cover things, and then cover that with thick layer of straw or wood chips.

It has huge benefits for water retention, weed prevention, as well as providing carbon to be broken down by the soil life which will improve your soil over time.

Animats• 9 years ago

The wheels look too tiny for the real world. Nice idea, though.

This guy invented the Roomba? He must have been really screwed by iRobot if he has to do a Kickstarter to fund his next project. He should either have enough money or the reputation to talk to VCs.

usaphp• 9 years ago

With VC you are giving up part of the company and control, with kickstarter you are still the boss and get all the profits

mastazi• 9 years ago

Yes exactly, and "having to do" a Kickstarter doesn't necessarily mean that he "must have been screwed", I think regardless of how much capital you may or may not have, there is no shame in raising funds, is there?

ingenuous2• 9 years ago

It seems possible to me that he wants to use that reputation so he can get just as much money without giving up equity.

Just like this news article showed. Guy with this idea? MEH. Inventor of the Roomba? Let's write it up!

Why would he give up money when he has the best marketing he can't buy? (cheaply)

icebraining• 9 years ago

Kickstarter is also used for market validation.

TulliusCicero2• 9 years ago

Kickstarters are also a useful way of generating hype.

jaclaz2• 9 years ago

I am also perplexed.

The "goal" on KickStarter is set as US$ 120,000 (at this moment it reached more than double that US$ 265,213).

So he asked to receive between 108,000 and 110,000 US$ (net of the Kickstarter fee of 5% and of the additional - absurd BTW - "payment fee between 3 and 5%).

This can be a rather large or a ridicoulosly small amount (of course it depends on points of view) but I propend for the "ridicolously small".

A (hopefully) succesfull robotics engineer in his fifties should have (or can procure through relations) that amount of money easily, and he is "only" a co-founder (and CTO) of the new company.

It seems to me - I have noticed it on other projects that ask for otherwise senselessly small amounts of financing - that Kickstarter is used only to give some visibility to the product/invention.

Seen this way the 10,000-12,000 US$ (financed by crowd BTW) are more "advertising expenses" than anything else, and even if at the end Kickstarter gets (thanks to the higher level of founding contributions) double of that, it is still peanuts for the amount of visibility it provides.

fenwick67• 9 years ago

Yeah for projects like this the Kickstarter is really just used for "pre-sales" and marketing.

sitkack4• 9 years ago

Needs lasers, invasive bugs are worse.

fragsworth• 9 years ago

As a Roomba owner, I have to say that I'm not really impressed with their decision to make another product when their first one barely even works.

"Some 15 million of them are cleaning floors all over the planet, and they’re doing so reliably and affordably and autonomously enough that people keep on buying them"

It is absolutely not "reliable". It's barely better than cleaning the floor myself. Some days, cleaning the floor myself would actually be easier, or ends up being what I have to do anyway. The number of issues I've run into with the damned thing is absurd and I feel like they should be fixing those before making a new product.

I think people are for the most part getting tricked into buying these. They're not that great.

jfries• 9 years ago

This is not Roomba creating a new product. Same inventor but different company.

205guy• 9 years ago

First of all, it's not the same company as roomba (irobot). Sounds like you had issues with your roomba (you don't say what they were), but I don't see how that is related to being "tricked."

My anecdata: we've had three since 2009, the earlier ones cleaned well but got dirt inside and eventually stopped working after 2 years. Our latest one bought 3 years ago seems better designed and more reliable, zero problems so far. Ours runs 2-3 times a week, mostly on wood and linoleum floors, and fills up with pet hair and dirt each time. We don't fiddle with the IR barriers, we just put a box in a doorway if we don't want it to roam, and we don't worry about docking, we just pick it up wherever it stops, empty it and dock it manually. Overall, it does a good job of getting most of the dirt in an area, but there is still the need to do a deeper clean once a month. Not affiliated, just a satisfied customer.

secure• 9 years ago

I’ve had a Roomba 780 cleaning my apartment daily since 2013. Issues I’ve encountered so far:

1. It occasionally doesn’t properly return to the home base, because it’s hard to find a good place for the home base where it can’t be moved/knocked over accidentally. This happens maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks, and is just a mild annoyance: you just need to carry the Roomba to its home base yourself.

2. After 3 years of usage, the battery died in such a way that it emptied rapidly enough for the Roomba to not be able to return to the home base. This was easily fixed by installing a new battery.

I recently upgraded to the Roomba 980, and it seems to work better than the 780 — it cleans more quickly and returns to its home base more reliably. Also, less cleaning required due to a different brush design.

Overall, I feel that I’m definitely getting my money’s worth out of the product, and it’s doing a great job at vacuuming. YMMV, but for me, it’s great.

josefresco• 9 years ago

3x the value of a non-robotic vacuum?

pix642• 9 years ago

A roomba simply cannot get in tight corners, behind tv stands, etc where dust and dirt collect.

koonsolo• 9 years ago

I like my Roomba, as the way I like my dishwasher.

Can I personally clean the foors better? Yes. Can I personally clean my dishes better? Yes. Dishwasher sometimes turns things upside down, doesn't clean properly etc.

But the main reason is that it saves me a lot of time, and it's good enough for me. Maybe not for you.

Schytzophrenic• 9 years ago

I've been thinking of what a more efficient and effective dishwasher would look like, and I think it would be something like: 1) you put dishes in it continuously and it cleans continuously, no start/stop cycle, such that when one is done eating, one puts the dirty dish directly into an opening that then slowly swallows it up (leaving dishes in the sink to dry out is what makes them so hard to clean). 2) a more effective filtering system that empties out automatically at a more frequent rate, so you can put very dirty dishes in and it can handle them without recycling dirty water and 3) ideally, robotic graspers that can hold each dish, conceptualize the shape, and actually scrub the dish.

vortico• 9 years ago

I agree. Companies and consumers alike need to step back and ask themselves "How much time does it take to complete this task without this product? How much time on average will it take me to complete the task with this product?" Those are the hard numbers you should look at when buying a home automation product. I wouldn't be surprised at all if for Roomba, the numbers are 1 hour and 45 minutes, respectively.

freehunter• 9 years ago

The Roomba doesn't clean as good as I could, doesn't clean as fast as I could, and doesn't clean as cheaply as other products could. But I live in a house with laminate floors, two dogs, and a cat. Trying to keep up with their fur is a losing battle, so I'm more than happy to spend $300 once and have something that will run every day and keep the fur off the floor.

It's not replacing a normal vacuum, anyone who thinks so is fooling themselves. It's to keep your house cleaner in between normal deep cleans.

codingdave• 9 years ago

I think you are missing the point -- The Roomba barely works better than YOU cleaning floors. And this weeding robot does a crappy job compared to ME weeding my garden.

But our Roomba was a miracle worker when my wife was laid up in bed for 6 months with a shattered pelvis and I was also extremely sick. And while I know how, and have time, to weed my garden, this robot could help people who don't have the time or energy to keep up with such thing. And the stories don't even have to be that dramatic - in a family with 5 kids, there are better ways to spend time than vacuuming carpets.

Sometimes having devices like this isn't about the quality of the work - it is just about the work getting done at all, so your time can be spent on more important things.

ChuckMcM• 9 years ago

Joe Jones is one of my heros, I've still got my copy of "Robots: Inspiration to Implementation" that was such a great focal point for robotics in the 90's.

Tilling seems like something that would be pretty challenging though. The whole "weed/not weed" thing has a lot of interesting questions around it. I always thought something that would keep your driveway and sidewalk clear of snow would be the next bit opportunity to automate.

sgustard• 9 years ago

It's not clear from the article, but if I let this loose on my lawn, will it eliminate all the grass?

jprissi2• 9 years ago

Does anyone know why the wheels are inclined this way? I guess it has much more grip on the soil this way but is there something else?

colordrops• 9 years ago

It's explained in the video. It scrubs the ground to prevent weed saplings from growing.

jprissi2• 9 years ago

Thanks, I didn't pay attention to the video the moment he said that.

purpleidea• 9 years ago

What stops someone from walking up to your garden and stealing your robot?

ginko• 9 years ago

The law?

visarga3• 9 years ago

The fact that it isn't worth the effort to steal it? I mean, it's a nice demo, but it has to be better than that to be useful. They say it needs planks all around the work zone. That could be solved with a camera placed at some height. What if the soil has small ditches, as it is the practice when planting? It needs nice level soil to work, as well. It's not using computer vision, or not an advanced form of CV to distinguish good from bad plants. So it requires manual identification for each plant. In my opinion, it's not ready for prime time yet.

paapi__gudiya• 9 years ago

CCTV cameras, my dog, my grandma.

martinmusio7• 9 years ago

Tertill solves a big issue. Lots of ppl want to have a weed free garden and don't have time/ don't want to pull out weeds all the time. But I do hope, though, that Tertill is just a very basic starting point. I can immediately think of 20-25 improvements.

c38331742• 9 years ago

The main issue with just trimming is that sprouts coming up from roots of nearby trees have infinite energy and will get thicker every time you cut them.

Not to mention that the worst weeds also spread horizontally

Davidbrcz• 9 years ago

Have a look at naio technologies (http://www.naio-technologies.com/en/).

They make agricultural robots for easing farming. They have a bunch of robot to remove weed

PerilousD• 9 years ago

I can think of two very specific (for me) use case. Kill weeds in driveway pavers / patios where anything growing green is fair game and a Poison Ivy extreme prejudice terminator. I don't want to use pesticides since I have dogs and enough land to see the occasional rabbit, turtle, garden snake and I don't really want to harm them either.

monochromatic2• 9 years ago

Does Roundup actually hurt animals?

devrandomguy• 9 years ago

Which animals has it been tested on, and where are the studies? Chemistry is presumed dangerous until proven safe.

Shivetya2• 9 years ago

It feels like everyone gets their own Martian rover to me. still a world of solar powered helpers for menial tasks is interesting. with low enough costs eventually you won't care about how many you need.

Twirrim2• 9 years ago

Gah. I have to wonder who thought the ieee.org website design was a good idea. 2/3rds of the page taken up with not the article, but a whole bunch of noisy, visually intrusive links to everything and its mother? The article sort of squeezed in on the left 1/3rd seeming almost like an afterthought.

EdwinHoksberg• 9 years ago

This is what it looks like on a 2560x1440 resolution monitor: https://i.imgur.com/08mYqWq.jpg Yes the small column on the left is the article.

deepinthewoods• 9 years ago

You've both zoomed out in your browsers. Press CTRL+ a few times until you get back to 100%. Article takes up half the screen for me in Chrome+FF, 100%zoom @ 1440p.

chiph• 9 years ago

The "if it's small, it's a weed" is probably ok for a v1.0 product. They might want to talk to Toshiba - they bought IBM's retail Point-of-Sale business a few years ago, and they had a product called "Veggie Vision" [1] that identified produce at the cash register via a camera.

Insert "Not Hotdog" joke here, but having a wifi connection to the cloud where heavy-duty weed classification software could be run would keep the device costs low.

[1] http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?i...

jaclaz2• 9 years ago

Insert "Not Hotdog" joke here, but having a wifi connection to the cloud where heavy-duty weed classification software could be run would keep the device costs low.

Actually I would like to insert here that time the connection was down for half an hour and the thingy eradicated all aunt Julia's plants, and it's not a joke (at least according to aunt Julia, who didn't laugh at all).

blurbleblurble2• 9 years ago

This is ridiculous but I'd rather see people going this route than spraying glyphosate or some other poison. That said, the root of this is a dangerous kind of hubris.

The idea of weeds is a tragic fallacy. There are some "weeds" that are selling for up to $15/lb (nettles, lambs quarter). Most weeds are beneficial for cooking and herbal medicine. And most any weed can have some kind of beneficial role in the garden.

Same thing goes for "pests". One plant's pest is another plant's companion.

Yet people are all but obsessed with exterminating misunderstood creatures from their local ecosystems. In my view, this robot is not so far off in the grand scheme of things from a robot that goes around killing other animals and even people, based on shallow, superficial misunderstandings of another being's potential.

I wish as much engineering effort went into understanding as it does into stuff like this.

JoeAltmaier8• 9 years ago

Lets not get hyperbolic - folks pull plants for a local monoculture of beneficial botany. That's all. Its not a skynet extermination program or anything.

Heck, I pull volunteer flowers from my flower bed if they don't jibe with this years' layout. Its not about what's a 'weed'. Its about what I want in this here bed, and what I want in that one over there.

blurbleblurble2• 9 years ago

On one hand, I feel you. Actually, I think a "weeding robot", programmed well, is a much better alternative to the chemical/GMO program.

But weeding as an act of moderate human selection isn't what irritates me. It's peoples' blind acceptance of an entire false taxonomy of "good" vs "bad" plants/organisms. It's dualistic and dangerous in the long run. It's stupidity posed as common sense. It's a kind of eugenics that's directed not just at humans but at entire ecologies.

Right now what Monsanto is doing with chemical resistant plants is unconscionable. The glyphosate scheme is obscene. It's worse than some skynet extermination program. In the midst of a massive loss of the earth's sustaining biodiversity, we have unchecked corporate powers playing out obscene world domination plans. The stakes are too high. Why do people feel so nonchalant about the Roundup scheme? Why do we eat their corn? Cause they're only killing weeds.

There's a massive extinction happening right now. What are we doing? Programming robots to decrease biodiversity.

klenwell• 9 years ago

My parents used to make me weed our yard as a chore and a punishment. I still harbor an irrational contempt for the sow thistle you see all around southern California.

I heard someone, a successful ecologist or chef or landscape artist I believe, once say their parents wouldn't let them pick a weed unless they could identify it.

That struck me as a truly brilliant idea. I think it also helps combats that fallacy you've pointed out.

trhway• 9 years ago

scale it up a bit and drop a bunch of them in Middle East to weed out terrorists.

cmurf• 9 years ago

Seems like insects and rabbits are a bigger problem for the typical backyard gardener than weeds. So if the robot has insect and rabbit shooing modes, maybe...

tertillpower• 9 years ago

I like this robot. It's cute

alsoagree2• 9 years ago

yes

alsoagree2• 9 years ago

surprised more people aren't pointing this out

Roomba Inventor Joe Jones on His New Weed-Killing Robot

Related Stories