Just saw new device—laser weeder!!

So I just got a glimpse of a new device and I was wondering where or even if it fits into Permaculture.  That device is a laser weeder.  It looks something like a 4-wheel cart that straddles a garden bed (this looked like it was made for market gardening) and as it slowly crawls over the bed, it scans the plants growing in the soil.  Using an AI, it identifies plants that are crops and ignores them.  The other crops get zapped by a laser which burns them right down to the soil level, and maybe just a bit lower.  As it crawled over, one could see little puffs of smoke from weeds that just lost a fight with a laser.

This had me thinking about where it fits into Permaculture and I can see two divergent perspectives.  On the one hand, this virtually eliminated hand weeding and thus labor costs.  Also, since it burns the weeds very precisely just as they poke their heads up, it doesn’t disturb the soil.  It probably takes a few days worth of passes, but after a while, all the weeds that could have been a problem have been eliminated.  This is all good.

On the downside, obviously this is another piece of expensive equipment to buy.  It is probably incompatible with mulch which would not only shield the weeds, but also be a fire hazard.  Also, it is an energy draw, but how much I simply don’t know—it might not be all that much.

I actually could see this being very useful in some circumstances, but I wonder what everyone else thinks.

Thoughts?


Eric

I bet it would take some serious hacking to make it support extensive polyculture.

my first Permie response is "but I need those weeds, what's the rabbit going to eat?", lol.
more realistically....what's it powered by? what is the structure it needs? what's it made of, how much plastic and rare earth elements and battery stuff went into it? can it be repaired? and what happens if there's a bunny in the garden??? also, the ID software I've seen has been kind of iffy- I don't trust my spouse to weed the garden, I'm really going to let a bot do it? I have doubts.
....much as i like the idea of hacking it to zap slugs, I'm more concerned about when the robot revolution comes and it burns down my back door to eliminate the human element....

Call me a modern Luddite, but I kind of enjoy weeding. I like the idea that the weeds turn into compost tea or rabbit pellets. It's certainly better than chemical-based alternatives, but I'm not sold on it.

I am sure I saw an ad or article for such a device.  Having worked with delinquents, I am having visions of some neighborhood angels placing boxes of matches, cherry bombs, and bottle rockets in its path…not to mention the slow burning fuse that leads to god  knows what.

Oh yes …aerosol cans

I just got around to looking up the welder. The one I saw was much smaller.

I think it would fit into organic farming  - reducing hand weeding costs etc. I'm not sure so much it fits into permaculture, mostly because of those hidden costs of production and use. There are probably much worse things.

Yes—it sounds like an even more expensive herbicide substitute.

Possibly, it will be decided that herbicides are toxic and out of date (true) and every farmer needs to buy an army of weed robots and keep them all running, and the repairs cost a fortune and you have to send them to a special company which knows how to replace the tiny parts… or worse you just replace it every time it breaks. The thing they would replace isn’t excellent, but that’s how things tend to progress.

Nancy, I think you hit the nail on the head.

The strict permaculture side of me says that this is some sort of abomination because it is a machine, has embodied energy in its construction, probably uses a fair amount of energy, and is possibly made of rare earths and the like.

But many of us, myself included, find tractors indispensable, and many of these arguments also apply to tractors. True, tractors are very multi-purpose machines and the laser weeder is a single use device.  And although the laser weeder can’t weed through a mulch, I bet that a mulch can be applied later after all the weeds have been zapped.

And Nancy, this definitely scales best to a long row of crops that are evenly spaced and I am sure will save on labor costs for weeding on a large-scale market garden that does not use ‘cides and otherwise uses organic and maybe even permaculture principles (Permaculture is never so precisely defined that there is a clean line between organic and permaculture).  And of course we do support organic agriculture.

I suppose that if this can be used in lieu of ‘cides, then this is a big step in the right direction for many market gardeners.  Hopefully then the rest of their practices will trend towards Permaculture.

But truthfully, it just *sounded* so interesting—a laser weed zapper—that I thought it was worth mentioning.



Eric

Crud. I was hoping you had seen something I hadn't.
I saw the laser weeders, hate the excess tech, 100% hate the AI.  
I like some of the concept, I'd like a hand held laser burner I can have in my pocket and execute weeds easily. THAT is what I was hoping you had seen.

Those automated ones can't say "Oh, that's going to flower!" or "Oh, the mint has jumped!" or "Oooh, wonder what that is?" It's made for mono crop row cropping.

But a hand held one that I can use to make it easier to control some of the seriously obnoxious weeds.... that would interest me.

Edit: OOOH, and take out Japanese Beetles! They fly fast if you try to grab them, but they don't know a laser is a hazard. Mwahahaha

And one more Edit:  PLUS a bonus would be young boys would happily hunt Japanese beetles and grasshoppers with lasers :D  Put those video game skills to good use!

Pearl,

A hand-held laser weeder would be a real back saver!

Given the energy requirements to get the laser hot enough in a brief amount of time, I imagine that the laser could probably fit in your hand, but the energy supply could not.

But many there could be something like a backpack mounted leaf blower where the batteries fit in a harness carried on the back and a cord connected to a hand-held laser.  My bet is that it would need two lasers—a spotter laser and the burning one.  The spotter would need to be bright enough to be seen in the day and would show exactly where the burning laser will hit.  I would further imagine that a green laser would be necessary for the spotter (so it would show up easily against green foliage).

Pearl, is this something that you could possibly see as practical?  It could certainly be a back saver as it would eliminate the need to bend over to chop into the ground.  You could also zap Japanese beetles.


Eric

In a world full of choices that have related risks, the idea of a laser weeder alternative to OTHER 'weeders' sounds like a step in the correct direction.

I am unfamiliar with the technology, but I assume that this is something that will be marketed towards large scale agriculture at first. I decided to do a little digging...



With time and improvement, I'm sure this technology will become cheaper and the scale will become smaller and smaller.

For permaculture purposes, I'd love to have something that is handheld for plant termination purposes where AI would not be needed but some kind of safeguard for operations would need to be in place to avoid injury. Maybe enough of a sensor to tell plant matter from other?

Thank you for sharing this, who doesn't love frickin' laser beams!?

The Laser weeder by Carbon Robotics:

https://carbonrobotics.com/laserweeder

Idk if it’s already been mentioned here, but aside from the practical uses for the actual tool, AI itself is currently having incredibly real, negative environmental effects. The training and running of AI models produced massive carbon emissions, and even the data centers that support AI apps produce a huge portion of global electricity. Not to mention the mining of rare earth minerals to make AI components. Just a quick google search shows that training OpenAI's GPT-3 model is estimated to have produced 502 metric tons of CO2. Then there’s the e-waste. The data centers also use massive amounts of water to keep the servers cool. All in all it’s starting to look like AI is completely unsustainable, if not downright harmful. If this is something anyone is interested in, you can add -AI to the beginning of your google/safari/etc searches to eliminate the automatic AI summary.

Those massive monocrop fields being robot weeded just make me feel very sad.