09 March 2023 Thursday
Lasers, Drones and Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Weeding
Deanna Kovar of US agricultural equipment giant John Deere says the company's new tractor-pulled weed sprayer could cut herbicide use by two-thirds. The system, called See & Spray Ultimate, looks like a typical field sprayer with two long arms or "booms" sticking out from either side of the tractor. But what makes this sprayer so much more high-tech is that it is equipped with 36 cameras. By constantly scanning the plants in front of them, they can instantly identify what is a crop and what is grass.
Controlled by an artificial intelligence (AI) software system, the connected sprinkler sprays only the weeds instead of wetting the entire field. To help the software identify weeds, a John Deere database has more than 300,000 images.
“Our system captures two million pixels per second, so it sees and processes a lot,” says Ms. Kovar, vice president of Manufacturing and Precision Agriculture Production Systems at John Deere.
The system currently works with three crops (corn, soybean, and cotton) and is only available in the US so far.
Several competitors, both large and small, continue to develop similar smart weeding technologies for farmers elsewhere in the world. Among them is the German company Bosch BASF Smart Farming, whose camera weeder is called the Smart Spray Solution.
