[toyg]

I agree, but to be fair, you could even skip that and just have a remote pilot looking at the rolling video feed and clicking on targets. It still beats having people actually walking under the sun and ruining their backs to pull out weed, or blanketing with herbicide.

I'm not so sure punching is a great solution though. Weed is incredibly good at reforming from very very small bits left standing.

[visarga]

> you could even skip that and just have a remote pilot looking at the rolling video feed and clicking on targets.

Then you could use that video to train a network to find weeds and get rid of the operator. You could also test the network a part of the same dataset to see how well it finds the right spots.

[BurningFrog]

This will create weed breeds that look more and more indistinguishable from the crops.

[a_bonobo]

Funny enough, this has may have already happened - Darnel was probably domesticated around the same time as wheat, and now it looks pretty much like wheat. There's a chance that humans accidentally swept it up when they domesticated wheat. The problem is that Darnel is psychotoxic and ingestion in the worst case can lead to a coma.

Possibly locked review: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-13145-5...

[ars]

To get "more and more" you have to have a weed that triggers a partial response from the machine.

This works with a chemical - i.e. an accidental low dose, but I don't see how that would happen with this machine.

If, you had a weed that was so close to the crop it was only sometimes recognized then yes, but weeds mostly look nothing at all like the crop.

[InclinedPlane]

beats ... I hope that was intentional.

Seriously though, you're right, even if it requires a human in the loop it's still a huge benefit. Farms could even use remote workers to do the identification.

[Splines]

This seems like the easiest way to get it working now. In fact, you could do the inverse at some point in the crop cycle - get workers/robots to identify the viable crops, and from that point on stamp everything else remotely plant-like out.

[Animats]

Humans are too slow. If this can be done at all, it can be done far faster than a human can do it.

[jhallenworld]

Kill them with fire! http://www.thermalweedcontrol.com/index.html