[Animats]

It's here now. Blue River makes LettuceBot, which is a machine-vision system for killing weeds in lettuce fields. The machine is towed behind a tractor, looks down at the lettuce and weeds, and zaps weeds and too-close-together lettuce plants with targeted sprays of concentrated fertilizer.[1] It's a full neural net vision system, with many cameras and software borrowed from face recognition. They train the system with pictures of weeds and pictures of good plants, and as it rolls over the field, it targets the bad stuff and sprays it.

This isn't experimental. It's now owned by John Deere and is currently doing 10% of the US lettuce crop. Next, cotton. There's no problem with plants becoming resistant to weed-killers. Unless pigweed learns to look like lettuce, it's going to get zapped.

It's sold as a service. For $220 an acre, Blue River comes and zaps your weeds. Now available in the Salinas Valley and Yuma, AZ.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YCa8RntsRE