Laser “death ray” kills weeds 80x faster than humans | Hard Reset
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 มิ.ย. 2023
- This death ray kills weeds 80x faster than humans - with no chemicals.
Subscribe to Freethink on TH-cam ► freeth.ink/youtube-subscribe
Watch more of Hard Reset ► • Hard Reset by Freethink
Every weed growing in a farm field takes away nutrients from the food humans are trying to grow and eat. Weeds are a significant pain for farmers: They are not only expensive to control but are also able to develop resistance to herbicides, meaning that farmers may resort to using more powerful chemicals on crops just to kill the unwanted, wild plants.
That’s why Carbon Robotics has developed an autonomous system that uses lasers to kill weeds, all without spraying potentially dangerous chemicals on crops or damaging the soil. The method can help farmers boost crop yield and make costs more predictable, not to mention resources saved on weed control.
The Seattle-based company proposes that its LaserWeeder system is just a first glimpse of how artificial intelligence will revolutionize agriculture.
◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠
Read more of our stories on farming:
Farmers can fight invasive insects with AI and a robotic arm
►www.freethink.com/robots-ai/s...
3 ways autonomous farming is driving a new era of agriculture
►www.freethink.com/hard-tech/a...
Agricultural photosynthesis lets us grow plants in total darkness
►www.freethink.com/science/art...
◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡
Watch our original series:
► Hard Reset: • Hard Reset by Freethink
► Just Might Work: • Just Might Work by Fre...
► Challengers: • Challengers by Freethink
◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠
About Freethink
No politics, no gossip, no cynics. At Freethink, we believe the daily news should inspire people to build a better world. While most media is fueled by toxic politics and negativity, we focus on solutions: the smartest people, the biggest ideas, and the most ground breaking technology shaping our future.
◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡◡
Enjoy Freethink on your favorite platforms:
► Daily editorial features: www.freethink.com/?...
► Solutions-based stories, straight to your inbox: www.freethink.com/subscribe/?...
► Facebook: / freethinkmedia
► Instagram: / freethink
► Twitter: / freethinkmedia
► Join the Freethink forum: / freethinkforum - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Try to spray, required nutrients, at the same time so that the operating cost of usage of machinery, might be reduced dramatically.
maybe better a couple of seconds later?
Spray nutriants....Mur Fermin! Big Chem garbage.
My ag profs always reminded us: We grow in soil. It’s not dirt. Dirt is what we sweep up with a broom.
I have a feeling that hyperspectral cameras would be better suited for this than computer vision and AI. Each plant species has a unique spectral signature that is way easier to read and doesn't require much AI training.
I can agree
Unimaginative, cash pressed startup devs will resort to AI bruteforcing 99% of the time, innovative and efficient solutions are not a thing anymore
You guys see your opinions, sitting back watching youtube videos, as superior to the guy who'se dedicated his carerer to this. The guy spending hundreds of hours testing nad retesting in field conditions. Rewriting code. Retesting. Hundreds of hours in challlenging , variable conditions. Nice.
@@paulraymond139 it's not that the machine is bad, it's just that it could've probably been done with a lot less computer if he wanted to
@@paulraymond139 The only one saying we think our opinions are superiors is you. I've seen people achieving great results without AI using only hyperspectral cameras.
You don't want bare soil, it dries out and looses nutrients and good bacteria, and becomes dirt. Better to find a non-invasive ground cover that wont choke out the good plants we want, and can keep the soil healthy. However, with these you can program multiple crops at the same time, so you could co-grow complimentary crops that wont hurt each other and will better cover the soil.
You're not a real person. This is a bot.
This machine allows farmers to keep any beneficial plant they want on their fields, you can tell it not to shoot specific species. It depends on what the grower wants.
In terms of soil health and microbiology- herbicides are enemy to those qualities since they degrade microbial activity which in turn affects the whole soil system and even degrades crop nutritional quality for consumption.
Partly true but weeds in the growing space of crops are 100 percent detrimental. In a perfect world you would have furrows with weeds and plants growing in them but regulations in California AG don’t allow that currently.
Soil is exposed only at the beginning, once crops have grown, and they are designed that way, they cover the gaps! You don’t be worried!
That can be solved by mulching.
Next up is using lasers to roast aphids right off the leaf... and I'm here for it.
What great advancement(s) in weed removal!
I wished Permaculture principles, no till, and regenerative agriculture was more practiced.
This machine is great at creating bare soils that will bake in the sun.
Especially if it's to grow lettuce as in this video, which need so much water, it would be best to use aquaponics.
exactly my thoughts. but still better, than spraying that same bare soil.
Maybe they are using lettuce as the example crop for the simple fact it is the easiest to train artificial intelligence on? Proof of concept. Then you produce a video like this to get the investors. I have had plenty of experience with my own aquaponic system to understand that it’s the perfect and most efficient way to produce lettuce. Either way, I think it’s awesome that this technology will clearly become a reality.
@@thebestlutz Then try to mass produce your lettuces and sell them for cheaper than his. Market is ready for cheaper healthy foods :)
What you are saying is the best solution but currently in California the laws regarding this eco hybrid ag are not very allowing
@@ThePigGoesQuackwhy?
As a person who did the whole human weed killer thing, can confirm, it sucks, you still see weeds when you close your eyes 😭.
Great shots and I like the commenter's voice. I would have liked to see how the laser is redirected to the weeds, what happens when the plants we want are so big that cover weeds, how frequent you need to use the laser, costs of the machine
I can answer a couple of these questions - the lasers shoot their beam into a mirror that can swivel around to aim the laser pretty flexibly - and this lets them shoot the laser under leaves that might obstruct the beam. Also, they tend to run this through field while the plants are all really small, so there's not much obstruction to deal with. My understanding when we filmed with them was that they really only need to run this over the field once to clear out the weeds.
@@NickFromHardReset Are you part of the crew that filmed this video? Thank you for answering. So they needed to run the machine only once till the end of the harvesting process of that batch of plants?
@@jack8831 Yes! I'm the director/host of the show. I don't want to speak too generally about how many times they have to use this, because every crop and every farm is different. That said, when we asked the folks at this farm how many applications of this they used, they said just once. I believe they also have a hand crew that comes through later in the growing process, but they said that was more for just having humans to look through everything and make sure the crops were doing well.
This is so cool! I want this on all farms, and one for my yard!
(I can't use the weed and feed that contaminates my ground water!)
A fiber laser would be perfect for this thing. Diode pumped fiber lasers are already displacing CO2 lasers in metal cutting and are more energy efficient and durable (no glass tube)
yes that's very true but their more expensive than co2 lasers and plus co2 lasers still have uses but still are getting slowly phased out so I bet they will eventually move to fiber optics
Later particle accelerators will do the trick as plants will become more immune to light...
@@alvydasjokubauskas2587.
🤣🤣
New 2W IR diode lasers are available now. They can even engrave metal.
That means that this farmer can now sell all of his crops as organic!
You forgot about rodents. Farmers have to repel them too.
@@AccelerateYourSuccess Laser them too?
01:41
Totally wasted chance by the narrator who didn't pick up on Dr Evil's classic _"freakin' _*_lazer beam"_* quote.
I want you to know we definitely discussed this - and you’re right that it’s a fantastic and appropriate pop culture reference. But … we didn’t think our fair use argument was strong enough to include it in the piece. 😢
This is gonna be game-changing for everyone once it gets cheaper and more available farming can be cool like hydroponics and stiff but this is dope
Once it becomes effective. Too often people think technology is limited by price when it's actually limited by effectiveness.
@@annoyedok321 I'm aware of that
This is great stuff but I wonder if it will be able to distinguish between the weed and the crop in the case where it needs to be continuously weeded?
It is a simple training process with machine learning.
What is the projected cost of a unit?
Had no idea farming can be so cool!
farming is a high tech industry As far as I know
I wonder what the power requirements for this is. Sounds like all those high power lasers drink up a lotta juice.
Thanks for the information. Well put together. Jim Bell (Australia)
This entire episode sounds like a sales pitch
The ground in the video looks very flat. Does the laser weed killing robot work on hillsides?
I need this in backpack form.
I worry that there will be unintended consequences, but based just on this video, the concept is worth exploring.
Is this just prototype stage or are there farms using this?
Maybe weeds will evolve to look more like normal crops so that the ai can't detect them...
@@zile8869 Interesting.
We and a few other companies are using this machine. We have 2 machines one up here and one in Yuma. It is very real and very exciting.
And what is the price of this machine?
Or you could just do symbiotic permaculture farming where different plant species keep weeds at bay, protect the soil from erosion and help each other thrive, just as nature intended, no zapping or pesticides needed
Exactly this would be the best thing
Not to troll or argue. Could we consider that large scale cultivation cant be considered possible with mixed fields. Although i do agree switching to reintriduce nutrients, money doesnt permit this. People complain about a 2 dollar head of lettuce. If its not perfect its trash also. So between all this how do you plant anything else? You will loose to much money. So farmers plant same crops year after year to try and make profits to stay afloat. All this is still being controlled by weather as well. We need more rain.... To many variables.
All plants other than the cash crop are weeds. They steal water, nutrient and sunlight from the cash crop.
@@dankforestagreed and current ag laws here don’t allow this type of thing
you can scale this one for the food needs of 10B people without cutting jungles and ancient woods, affecting wild life, eh? :D Think again ..
I figure we need a lot more vertical farming...
Now I really want this but as a hand held gun with back pack so when someone ask what u spraying I would just say "Laser"
Is there a fire hazard?
You could probably accomplish the same with high pressure water jets. They would be very good a diarupting the weeds root system.
Shorter pulse times will increase the power density enough to cause cascading ionization within the plant, this likely would also destroy rhizomes and roots.
Is it killing it at the root? Just looks like it's burning some of the leaves.
It is burning the weed at the stem and we use it on weeds so small that this burning will sufficiently kill the weed
O.k. Freethinkers, how to make one portable and simple enough for home gardeners' use?!! I have been in a quandary to kill-off non-native weeds that are taking over my back yard. The herbicides, while effect have serious side-effects for humans as well as wildlife. Can anyone tell me whether such a device is available (and affordable) on today's market? Thanks.
Looking forward to the future when I can go to the local garden center and ask "Phased plasma weeder, 40 watt range" 🙂
I wonder why you can't just push the weed back into the ground. I've seen some robot do that before. Seems like that could be a lot faster.
Can you use on thorns and thistles?
Any weed can be killed. The AI just has to be trained and it can do jt
What about the roots ? does it kill the roots too? When I weed whack a weeds leaves I don't kill the root and it eventually grows back.
Considering the size of the plants being lasered, I’d assume the roots are still too small to recover effectively.
Cool! Does the smoke of the plant pollution? It's a combustion, so there is probably co2 right?
How to say your brainwashed without saying your brainwashed 😂
yes, but the amount of air pollution and CO2 released from this is probably too small to make a big difference
Can this eliminate violence on earth too though if scaled up?
I'd like to see weeds evolve to survive laser attacks
I’m interested in a hand held for my flower beds 😅
We like the way you think.
I love the idea and hate chemicals/GMO but this looks extremely expensive and power intensive. Its extremely slow, they did mention its 80x faster than human I believe, but what about a bio-degradable mulch? Sure they can come up through the hole where your crop is but hopefully it wont get enough sun to grow.
I feel like that is a much more viable option for most farmers who are trying to avoid chemicals/GMO and intensive labor.
We own two machines including the one in the video and we’re expecting return on investment in about a year. And after that point it will be profiting more than a hand crew.
@@ThePigGoesQuack The payback is just one year? WOW. How much ha/h do they?
@@felipealbertopereiralemes4451 We do about an acre an hour so about 0.4 ha/h. It runs about 10-12 hours currently but could really run for 24 hours straight
What's bad about GMO's? Literally every plant we eat is a GMO
@@rizizum Lots of GMOs have been developed in order to be unaffected by herbicides. This means that they are getting sprayed by herbicides every day and the consumer will end up eating some herbicides with their GMO corn for example unless they wash it well (even then I'm not sure if the herbicide actually dissipates)
Why doesn’t our tax money go towards this…
How does this company address the risk that the burning weeds might spark a fire?
It is highly improbable a fire would start considering that the weeds are so small when we use the machine. And the burning only lasts a couple milliseconds so there’s no real risk.
And so, the first step in Skynet's arms race had begun. Starts as weed killers. Then it moves to the food chain....💀
do we need any of this if we switch to hydroculture?
God bless the inventor of this and his team. May you grow rapidly
Love this!
So it takes 80 times longer to kill a human with this machine? Seems rather expensive.
Who has uploaded this video please
I'm so excited for mass adoption of this technology!
Herbicides are dangerous - so this looks like a better solution.
This has been out on the market for a couple of years. Now the need to zap bugs
bugs are an important part of the ecosystem, they don't need to be zapped, people need to farm holistically via permaculture and food forests where everything works together, no need for all this violence against nature
Laser “death ray”??? Is that what was used in Maui?
You have a faster one 8 months ago. Please explain.
Never mind, other one doesn't use lasers.
We finally get to see what the man who belongs to that voice looks like.
Cloud of smoke if behind the tractor. What is the size of carbon footprint of these lasers and how much electricity they consume ?
How to say your brainwashed without saying your brainwashed 😂
It’s definitely not a cloud of smoke. It’s barely any smoke to be honest. The lasers run off of the PTO generator on the front.
@@ThePigGoesQuack if you burn something, smoke goes anyway. In our green 2020s it is not good for business
Can i go under that Thing and laser my Eyes for cheap?
I want one of those hats
I think this is a good solution, it is always better than poisoning the soil and water with pesticides and herbicides.
There are other ways of growing crops, using polycultures instead of monocultures, which reduces so-called weeds, pests etc.
Well, a good initiative but with challenges and drawbacks like- it will be useless when crops grow and become denser. Also the cost to run this will be higher and it's mass supply will take years.
Why not profit from the weeds too?
This presenter is great!!!!
Pretty cool!
Fantastic and exciting technology, so long as it definitely 100% only kills weeds, as the chemicals currently used are doing huge damage to the environment, including people! Just make sure you power it with solar panels on top of the laser machines and/or solar panels and batteries at the farm - keep it 100% green with 100% renewable energy powered lasers.
May I ask: why don't you just use some kind of mechanical system to get rid off the weed? Laser looks like overkilling.
That's what we've been doing for thousands of years. Tilling, hoeing, hand removal = mechanical systems. I suppose you could put hoe and spade arms on a robot, but to me that sounds far more prone to breakdown (from dust, and general wear and tear), a whole lot more expensive to maintain, and much harder to build cheaply enough to replace herbicides.
@@Daniko2 Do you think mechanical systems are more expensive than lasers?
They mentioned in the video. Burning with the laser doesn’t disturb the soil, so it prevents erosion.
@@luismiguel5391 Initially, no. But the reason lasers are expensive is because they are still relatively new technology. There is still plenty of room for them to benefit from economies of scale (the more you make identical things, the cheaper each individual one is to make--up to a point). But the same is not true of mechanical devices like hoes, spades, and plows. They're already as cheap as they're likely to get. So if we haven't already incorporated them into weeding systems, it's far more likely to be because it's just not cheap enough to compete with herbicides and migrant labor.
Also, it's always more expensive to maintain the moving parts of a machine. The fewer of them there are, the cheaper maintenance is.
@@paulpease8254 Well designed mechanical systems doesn't disturb the soil either. That's just an excuse to sell the buzzwords. They use laser because is cool.
maybe someday someone will program these robots to eliminate humans with hyper accurate lasers
this needs to be funded.
Couldn't you just have a long propane burner that'd basically do the same thing?
It's all fun and games until we create laser-resistant weeds
Many weeds are produced by rhizomes, and killing their surface growth won't fully erratic the weeds.
Next, a build that fires tasty gamma rays ☢️
Amazing this has to happen everywhere and herbicides need to be outlawed if it takes industrial espionage to do it then of course
How it gonna kill wee when plant leaves get bigger
wait, but how do you know how fast the laser kills humans? how many humans?
Imagine the cost and maintenance of this machine 😂
Imagine the cost and maintenance for the people, tools, & herbicides individually killing every single weed in that field instead 💀
It is not as much as you think. We run it 24 hours a day with little maintenance. The truth is there is not much to service on it!
Unless it's cheaper than chemicals, I don't see a lot of farmers using it. Will it be cost comparable to less green methods? I hope farmers can afford the upfront cost. Because it does look very promising for farmlands.
It’s about a year until we will make profits off the machine
So will evolutionary pressure create weeds invulnerable to laser fire? 🤷🏽♂️
Dude u just homelandered those weeds
You can put a mini “death ray” on a school of Drones, to eliminate weeds!
Open source version should loqer costs
Amazing potential for ecological restoration.
it is better to coexist with the different varieties of plants in our world,they provide food for other life forms een thou we may not eat them. Those other life forms contribute to nitrogen fixing elements and food sources for wild life. i wouldnt want something like this to go out of control world wide the effects would spell disaster. In an outbreak of noxious weeds ect that have no known enimies mabey this would be a good tech to use on. .
LASERS > ROUNDUP
Do this plant killing marijuana??
What more we could do? Solar powered towing vehicles that could pull the laser thingy without a DIESEL BURNING TRACTOR running that slow. I could see unnecessary fuel costs and certainly unnecessary environmental costs not being an issue. (As long as it's sunny. Otherwise a slow diesel-burning tractor at slow speeds would still be very beneficial.) 😶
We are one man and Earth
Surely, methodology is the study of methods, not the methods themselves.
Takes care of weeds, what about insecst later on?
Hasta la vista to the weeds!
also the fact is this tech will get not only better but also be able to kill weeds while at higher speeds than the massive slow af crawl were seeing right now
I used a small steam cleaner in my garden. Slow but chemical free!
Do we get laser resistant weeds in the future? Exciting times to ne alive 😂
They will build star fighters and fight back or unlock defensive laser turret genes😂
EU parlament: is it emission neutral? No?! BAN IT !
yea only kills the weed on top of the soil, not the seed underneathe
9:34 yes, we should stop destroying topsoil - important lesson from Great Depression Dust Bowl. Unclear how often this has to be used. How long before we're killing weeds with laser drones instead?
I like how you think
This isnt the only laser weeder (for one). Also, having the server built into the machine is very outdated technologically. As other aspects of this are (others mentioned camera tech and laser tech, which I am not sure about but based on literally having a server inside one of these things, is likely true). Super cool, but definitely outdated.
would you elaborate on it please?
Great, now the weeds will evolve to fool robots (and humans). 😅
Maybe the tractor goes in Forza Horizon instead.
Imagine drifting this thing 🤣🚜
What to do with your old Zamboni🤣
Indoor vertical farming for some crops, no weeds and 365 day growing.
Cheers
Y'all just going to make a bunch of 'high-power laser-resistant weeds' - then it won't be such a cool idea any more, will it?
On a more serious note: I planted one of those 'flower mix' seed mixtures in part of my yard, and (since I can't tell 'emerging flower' from 'emerging WEED'), I used the iPhone plant identifier app 'PictureThis' to identify what to pull and what to leave growing.
Unfortunately so far, they were all weeds...
There's a newer, really OLD way of dealing with weeds. Don't use chemicals, and don't till the soil. You often plant when there is still a crop in the ground. You have fixed beds with walk paths between the beds. When you harvest anything except root vegetables, you leave the roots of the plant in the ground. This is called regenerative/no-till agriculture, and it can scale up to large farms, although it works better on a few acres or less, that 2 - 4 people manage. And it works well because it's highly profitable. You don't spend money on any chemicals. You DO either have to make compost or bring in material that can break down into compost to be put on top of the beds.
The goals are a few. One is plant density is higher, and the soil always has plants in the ground. This creates VERY healthy soil, and soil health is EVERYTHING in farming. It also adds material to the soil which over time greatly improves its ability to hold water and this leads to healthier crops. But plants have a relationship with the life in the soil. Plants produce sugars that get stored in the soil. In times of distress, the plants can pull this back in. But it also feeds the life in the soil. This life (microbiome) in turn feeds the plants by breaking things down and making available the nutrients the plants need.
Whenever you till the soil, you destroy the microbiome. And this isn't the tales of holistic wannabe farmers. Science shows this. The other thing that tilling does is brings weed seeds up from underneath the growing area for these weeds up to the surface where they can grow, so tilling defeats it's own purpose. When you have healthy soil and good plant density, weeds are very few, so even if you do spend some time pulling weeds, the fact that you have developed soft, loamy soil means you can pull it out of the ground and the roots come with it very easily. Also, because the soil is very healthy a minimal amount of weeds has little bearing on anything.
It's best once again to do this with smaller farms, like 10 acres or less, but there are farmers developing new techniques which allow them to use heavy equipment over hundreds of acres and they can do no-till operations. Now, this is new for large scale farming so the equipment and processes are a work in progress.
For details read about no-till farming or regenerative farming. It's too much info to put into a comments section.
Does this mean if it takes 10 seconds to kill a weed it will take 800 seconds to kill a human?
the weeds keep the topsoil stable. What's more important a little less yield or stable topsoil which builds a healthy eco system for the plant's roots.
THIS
@@paddywalf2330 Look to nature for the answer, not man. Nature has millions of years worth of trial and error to work out efficient systems compared to man. Who are you going to bet on to get it right?
There will still be weeds no matter what we do. The laser weeder is far better than any hand labor crews that do the same task and way less harmful to the environment than any herbicide.
@@ThePigGoesQuack Completely agree with you on the herbicide issue but i believe there are also other ways to deal with them in a more top soil friendly way as we need to move away from the current monoculture system in farming today
@@paddywalf2330We grow cover crop and other grasses and hays on open soil when we can but the truth is that california ag regulations don’t allow growing furrows or other forms of more topsoil friendly farming. Laserweeder is a hell of a lot more topsoil friendly than disturbing the soil using crews or a plow however.