LaserWeeder reaches 10 billionth weed eliminated

Jul 12, 2024

The unit is ready to fire a laser every 50 milliseconds

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

A piece of farm equipment that controls weeds without herbicides recently celebrated a milestone.

LaserWeeder from Carbon Robotics, which uses AI and lasers to identify, target and zap weeds, recently surpassed its 10 billionth eliminated weed.

“We had been watching it for quite some time,” Paul Mikesell, founder and CEO of Carbon Robotics, told Farms.com. “I remember when we first hit the 1 billion weed milestone, I was shocked. It’s very hard to imagine what 10 billion looks like and visualize 10 billion of anything.”

Farms.com first spoke with Mikesell in April 2021 when Carbon Robotics introduced an autonomous version of its LaserWeeder.

Since then, the equipment and its components have undergone changes.

The AI system, for example, has matured and now has millions of labeled objects in its database. This helps the weeder achieve high performance independent of conditions or crop the machine is running in.

The LaserWeeder can control about 300,000 weeds per hour, in more than 100 crops and in all soil conditions.

And the crop models are updated every 24 hours to ensure the weeders are using the latest images in the field.

“A lot of those weeds were shot and killed by our laser before they went to seed, caused any crop damage or stole any nutrients from the crops,” Mikesell said.

Carbon Robotics has also gone away from the autonomous units to a pull behind weeder.

The implement, which can be ordered with tracks, has a 20-foot coverage width and 60 to 84-inch adjustable row spacing.

It features 42 cameras targeting weeds. And 30 150W CO2 lasers can target weeds as small as the tip of a pen. And the lasers are ready to fire every 50 milliseconds.

For context, the blink of an eye is roughly between 100 and 150 milliseconds.

The LaserWeeder plugs into the three-point hitch.

“There’s a generator that runs off the PTO,” Mikesell said. “The generator provides 240-volt power into our robot. That’s how we get power to the lasers.”

The system also includes a repurposed iPad farmers can mount in the tractor cab to monitor the weeder’s performance.

“The data then goes to what we call the Carbon Ops Center, and you can get information from the center about your weeder’s progress, how many weeds it has shot, that sort of thing,” Mikesell said.

Customers who use the LaserWeeder are happy with its performance.

Carbon Robotics has testimonials on its website from American, European and Australian farmers about the benefits of laser weeding.

“We try to make sure farmers get a less than three-year ROI, that’s important to us,” Mikesell said. “And we’ve heard a lot about yield increases. We didn’t realize how much having hand labor or a cultivator in the field is setting back crops. We’re learning how much laser weeding increases yield.”

Carbon Robotics is planning on introducing new products separate from LaserWeeder in the coming months, Mikesell said.

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.