Carbon Robotics’ new AI model allows farmers to instantly identify and target new weeds without retraining robot systems
Seattle: A farming robot company called Carbon Robotics has built a smart computer system that can look at plants and know right away if they are weeds that need to be killed.
The company’s robot, called LaserWeeder, uses lasers to zap weeds in farm fields. Before this new system, every time a new kind of weed showed up, the robot needed to learn about it for a whole day. Now the robot can learn about new weeds in just seconds.
The smart system, called Large Plant Model, has been trained on pictures of more than 150 million plants. It can look at a plant it has never seen before and still figure out what kind of plant it is. Farmers can now tell the robot in real time which plants to kill and which ones to leave alone.
The company has put these robots to work on more than 100 farms in 15 different countries. They have raised over 185 million dollars from investors to help make the robots even smarter as they collect more plant pictures from farms around the world.