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ROBOTS CLEAR THE WEEDS
WEED CONTROL: Robots will soon be weeding the fields because they are good at it. Less weed killer will be used and more ecological gains made with robots in the field.
In the future robots will be pulling, cutting or burning weeds away in order to significantly reduce the use of chemical weed killers. They are not yet sufficiently reliable or efficient to put into production. But according to Michael Nørremark, who researches robot-based weed control at The Department of Agricultural Sciences, The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Denmark, robots will be seen in the fields within the next ten years.
“We expect that robots can reduce the use of weed killer by 75-100% with vegetables like potatoes, maize and beet which are planted in lines. We have calculated that regarding line crops, up to 280 tonnes of weed killer was used in 2003. If the robots meet expectations, they will be able to save line crops, the environment and consumers more than 200 tonnes of weed killer use every year,” says Michael Nørremark.
Expensive ecology
The price of organic vegetables and potatoes will probably also decrease when robots weed the fields, because it is expensive to have a person doing the weeding. Michael Nørremark expects that robots will take over between 50 and 100% of the weeding work which organic farmers currently do by hand with field vegetables and other line crops.
Robots can remove the weeds between the plants for example in a line of beet. They can weed Ôin the line’ and not just between the lines like ordinary agricultural machines. That is a great improvement because today weeds in the line can only be controlled manually or with weed killer. To be able to weed in the line, the robot needs to know where the beets are. Michael Nørremark therefore registers where he plants the beets in the field by means of a very accurate GPS technology. He reads in the location of the seeds in a digital seed map, and then knows the position of the beets to an accuracy of 17 millimeters. Based on the seed map, Michael Nørremark can then programme the robot’s route through the field.
If the robots need to weed very close to the beets, the digital seed map is not sufficiently accurate. To find the accurate position of the beet, the robot has to be able to see where the beet is located in the field:
Robot recognition
“Our collaboration partners at Research Centre Bygholm have developed an image processing programme enabling the robots to identify beets and other cultivated plants. The robot takes a digital image of the location where a beet should be placed according to the seed map. It knows the shape of the beet plant and can thus recognise the beets on the image. The robot then knows that it must remove the other plants, namely the weeds, says Michael Nørremark. “In the long term the robots will not only be able to recognise beets and other cultivated plants, but also various species of weed. This will mean that they can remove, for example, thistles and camomile which reduce the growth of the beet markedly, but leave harmless weeds such as corn speedwell. It will provide a greater diversity of plants and naturally benefit both insects and small animals.” Organic farmers in particular can benefit greatly from the weeding robots, because today their hoes can only be used to remove weeds between the lines. Weeding in the line means weeding by hand and that is expensive. If the robots meet expectations, they will be able to take over virtually all this weeding work, and thus bring about a significan reduction in prices for organic vegetables.
This page forms part of the publication 'FOCUS DENMARK' as chapter 3 of 20
Publication may be found at the address http://www.netpublikationer.dk/um/6249/index.htm
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