'There's no such thing as a laser-resistant weed' says company employing dozens of Nvidia GPUs to fry weeds with lasers from above

Farming Simulator 22 cool farming machine thing — (Image credit: Giants Software)

Do farmers traditionally wear sunglasses? If so, Alex Sergeev, the chief technology officer of Carbon Robotics, presumably took them off when telling Nvidia, "There's no such thing as a laser-resistant weed."

As reported by Tom's Hardware, the LaserWeeder from Carbon Robotics is a module you attach to a tractor that uses dozens of Nvidia GPUs to snipe out weeds as it drives by.

The Nvidia blog says this "compute muscle lets it identify and incinerate up to 10,000 weeds per minute." Notably, the machine also gathers that data and then feeds it back to a labelling tool, in order to contribute to an image data set of over 65 million images. The data harvested (get it?) then continues to train further generations of models to more efficiently whack the weeds (or perhaps I should say 'blast them from above').

LaserWeeder G2 600 - YouTube

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Despite the pretty scary trailer music, it does seem like a pretty neat device, and being able to analyse pictures of weeds for better recognition in the future means that it can get better with time. Or, at least a robot shooting highly targeted lasers seems like a good idea now. I think there may be movies, books, games, etc, warning about this somewhere…

The LaserWeeder reportedly stemmed from a conversation founder Paul Mikesell had with a farmer. Weed control was seemingly their single biggest problem. To tie to this, and as appears to be the prerogative of AI creators right now, the next step from here is the Carbon AutoTractor, "an autonomous retrofit for existing machines."

As pointed out by Nvidia, more than 25% of edible crops in the US aren't harvested due to the lack of labour. The AutoTractor is designed to patrol fields, but also allows for easy human takeover "if, say, a deer wanders into the field." It's also worth noting that any efforts made to remove powerful chemicals from farming is probably a good thing.

According to Nvidia, Carbon Robotics has rolled out over 150 LaserWeeders since its inception in 2018 and has managed to take out over 30 billion weeds. I assume AI was also responsible for counting this figure. The page for the G2 600 says it "Shoots 7,500+ weeds" every minute and "Outperforms a hand crew of 75 people". Sorry, weeds, you never stood a chance.

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James is a more recent PC gaming convert, often admiring graphics cards, cases, and motherboards from afar. It was not until 2019, after just finishing a degree in law and media, that they decided to throw out the last few years of education, build their PC, and start writing about gaming instead. In that time, he has covered the latest doodads, contraptions, and gismos, and loved every second of it. Hey, it’s better than writing case briefs.

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