‘There’s no such thing as a laser-resistant weed’ says company employing dozens of Nvidia GPUs to fry weeds with lasers from above
Do farmers traditionally wear sunglasses? If so, Alex Sergeev, the chief technology officer of Carbon Robotics, presumably took them off when telling Nvidia, “There’s no such thing as a laser-resistant weed.”
As reported by Tom’s Hardware, the LaserWeeder from Carbon Robotics is a module you attach to a tractor that uses dozens of Nvidia GPUs to snipe out weeds as it drives by.
This means farmers can avoid any chemicals to remove weeds, and opt for the natural approach of, well, blasting them with highly technological lasers. Ah, just like my grandma used to do.
Nvidia’s Jetson Thor, a Blackwell-based AI module, is being made available for the mass market, and Nvidia is currently showing off a few of the 2 million developers + working with it. The LaserWeeder G2 is Carbon Robotics’ new 12-module device, and each module has two GPUs. That means 24 GPUs are in each G2. That’s gotta be at least enough power for a LAN game of Counter-Strike 2.
The Nvidia blog says this “compute muscle lets it identify and incinerate up to 10,000 weeds per minute.” Notably, the machine also gathers that data and then feeds it back to a labelling tool, in order to contribute to an image data set of over 65 million images. The data harvested (get it?) then continues to train further generations of models to more efficiently whack the weeds (or perhaps I should say ‘blast them from above’).
Despite the pretty scary trailer music, it does seem like a pretty neat device, and being able to analyse pictures of weeds for better recognition in the future means that it can get better with time. Or, at least a robot shooting highly targeted lasers seems like a good idea now. I think there may be movies, books, games, etc, warning about this somewhere…
The LaserWeeder reportedly stemmed from a conversation founder Paul Mikesell had with a farmer. Weed control was seemingly their single biggest problem. To tie to this, and as appears to be the prerogative of AI creators right now, the next step from here is the Carbon AutoTractor, “an autonomous retrofit for existing machines.”
As pointed out by Nvidia, more than 25% of edible crops in the US aren’t harvested due to the lack of labour. The AutoTractor is designed to patrol fields, but also allows for easy human takeover “if, say, a deer wanders into the field.” It’s also worth noting that any efforts made to remove powerful chemicals from farming is probably a good thing.
According to Nvidia, Carbon Robotics has rolled out over 150 LaserWeeders since its inception in 2018 and has managed to take out over 30 billion weeds. I assume AI was also responsible for counting this figure. The page for the G2 600 says it “Shoots 7,500+ weeds” every minute and “Outperforms a hand crew of 75 people”. Sorry, weeds, you never stood a chance.
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