LettuceBot wants to kill the plants farmers hate
LettuceBot is made up of a number of modules containing a pair of cameras and an actuator that makes life and death decisions on plants and weeds when a human-driven tractor rolls through the crop. In simple terms, the first camera takes an image to size up the situation, that image is processed to detect crop plants from weeds, and a decision is taken on whether to spray the plants with chemicals. The second camera is at the rear to verify the actions.
"As we drive over the field, it's imaging, it's detecting every individual plant, it's going through and optimising which plants to keep and which ones to kill," Blue River Technology CTO and co-founder Lee Redden told Nvidia GTC on Tuesday.
"We identify in the field we've taken those actions, we then adjust corresponding geometry so in future it'll maintain the centimetre-level accuracy in this dirty, boggy environment where everything is getting busted around."
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