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.