Carbon Robotics, a Seattle-based agricultural robotics company, recently shared some news that should get environmentalists agog. They’ve created the Large Plant Model (LPM), an AI-driven research tool that improves identification of weeds in agricultural fields. This announcement came on Monday and marks a significant advancement in the company’s mission to streamline weed management for farmers using their innovative LaserWeeder technology.
In 2018, Paul Mikesell established Carbon Robotics. The company, founded in 2014, is focused on bringing new robotic solutions to agriculture, like their flagship LaserWeeder that uses lasers to kill weeds without traditional agrochemicals. The company started shipping its first machines in 2022. It soon after started laying the groundwork for its development of the LPM. This latest AI model will require no additional hardware and simply integrate into existing systems through a simple software update. Existing LaserWeeder users will benefit from improved plant recognition and more accurate performance.
Paul Mikesell, who worked on them extensively in previous stints at Uber and Meta’s Oculus virtual reality division, explained the LPM’s potential. He’s really enthusiastic about its potential to transform how the field operates! Its underlying model has a training set of more than 150 million labeled plants. The goal is to then use AI to reliably and precisely distinguish between weeds and crops given this data.
Previously, when farmers encountered a new type of weed on their fields, Carbon Robotics faced the laborious task of creating new data labels to retrain its machines. This meant that every time a new weed sprout came up, it was a 24-hour process. The LPM hopes to address this by ensuring real-time changes can be routed directly to the public.
“We have enough data now that we should be able to look at any picture and decide what kind of plant that is, what species it is, what it’s related to, what its structure is like, without having ever even seen that particular plant before, because we have so much data going into the neural net.” – Paul Mikesell
Beyond accuracy and efficiency, the new AI model gives farmers more control over the care of their crops. If a farmer identifies an unfamiliar weed, they can interact with the system to instruct it to eliminate that specific plant. WeedSmart International This new feature is a fundamental change in the way that farmers will be able to manage weed control across their farms.
“The farmer can live in real time and say, ‘Hey, this is a new weed. I want you to kill this,’ and that was something that had never been done before,” – Paul Mikesell
As the agriculture industry looks to the future with a growing reliance on automation and high-tech solutions, Carbon Robotics is at the forefront with its LaserWeeder. The LPM will do farmers a colossal favor in relieving the pain of weed management. It will improve productivity and reduce labor expenses.