AI-Powered Weed Hunters They could soon reduce the need for herbicides and genetically modified crops. This is reviewed in a publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Today's growing methods typically involve spraying indiscriminate amounts of herbicide on genetically modified crops, often both from the same company, to resist chemicals.

The data tells us that the pesticide and seed industry is huge, agglutinating a value of 100.000 million worldwide. Within this figure, herbicide sales represent 26.000 million. However, the help of machine learning and the arrival of specialized automata capable of differentiating between different types of crops and applying localized amounts only to weeds could change the story.

The Agriculture It is one of the fields that has benefited the most from automation and the landing of robots. If at other times we talk about alternatives such as Vegebot -a robot trained with deep learning algorithms to collect lettuce- or the benefits of drones for precision agriculture, in the case of reducing the use of pesticides, with its wide benefits environmental, machines bear a large part of responsibility.

Companies are experimenting with high-tech tools that can help farmers save time and money, as well as reduce the amount of chemicals applied to the harvest. One of the most outstanding startups is ecoRobotix from Switzerland, whose AI robot with cameras can identify all the plants on an organic farm. Driven on four wheels, he moves through the fields in search of weeds and sprays these weeds with small amounts of herbicide.

Company officials say the robot can fully operate on its own for up to 12 hours a day while powered by the sun using the same technology used by autonomous vehicles. In addition, farmers themselves can control the robot via smartphone. One of its co-founders, Aurelien Demaurex, explains that the robot can kill weeds with 20 times less herbicide than traditional methods by using just the right amount in the right place.