Seedling nurseries run by the U.S. Forest Service may soon get some robotic help when it comes to weeding.
The three-foot wide robot rolls along rows of seedlings. Its camera analyzes each speck of green poking out of the ground until it finds a weed.
“Then we start to do some magic,” said Professor John Shovic, director of University of Idaho’s Center for Intelligent Industrial Robotics, which created the machine.
“When we know where the weed is and we’ve positioned our robot so it’s pointing at the weed, we release 15,000 volts of electricity and that fries the weed right in place,” Shovic said.
His students went through a few ideas of how to actually kill the weeds, including using a laser or even a flamethrower. But they quickly settled on electricity.
“The [U.S. Forest Service] is sponsoring this. That means Smokey the Bear is paying for this,” said Shovic. “We can’t use something that’ll start fires.”
Programming the robot’s artificial intelligence to put only weeds in the crosshairs has taken time.
Shovic said there have been “parties” where attendees will manually identify weeds among hundreds of photographs that then get fed into the machine.
Right now, he estimates the program’s accuracy around 80-89%. Shovic hopes to boost that success rate beyond 90% as they further refine the AI into next year.
He and his students gave a demonstration of the robot earlier this summer, which Shovic said was a success.
Aside from improving the AI, students will need to enclose and weatherize the robot’s electronics with an outer shell.
Each unit can weed between one-third to half an acre over an eight-hour period per charge, Shovic said. Each will cost between $40,000 and $50,000.
He believes the first production model will be deployed at the USDA’s seedling nursery in Coeur d’Alene next year.
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