A startup is rolling out automated weed cutters at a moment when COVID-19 has made farm work more dangerous for human beings.
Why it matters: Robots in all fields have received a lift from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, and farming is no different. One of the oldest occupations in the world could be the next to be automated.
There are two ways to remove weeds from the farms growing specialty crops like lettuce. One is to use herbicides — but such chemicals have increasingly come under fire for their alleged toxicity. The other is to employ workers to do the back-breaking labor of pulling out weeds by hand — but those workers have become harder to find due to shrinking labor pools and immigration restrictions.
- The startup FarmWise is offering a third option: robots. The company’s Titan weed cutters autonomously trawl through fields, detecting and destroying weeds with retractable hoes.
- The robots use cameras and machine vision to create a 3D map of the farm plot and tell weeds from commercial plants.
- “One of the robots can replace the entire workflow for weeding, equivalent to a crew of 15 to 20 people,” says Sébastien Boyer, FarmWise’s CEO.
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