Overview and application
Farming has been around for centuries and so are the pesky weeds. Weeds may produce up to thousands of seeds per plant throughout the seasons. Weeds will compete with the crops for nutrients and ultimately affect the crops’ growth. The resilience of weeds also sees them capable of germinating and growing in every season of the year causing problems for farmers around the globe.
Farmers go into the field regularly to clean out the weeds by hand or schedule herbicide sprays to reduce weeds’ growth. Both methods have been employed over the years but manually going into the field exposes the farmer under the weather and subjects them to possible insect/ snake bites, or it may require a large quantity of manpower/ hour; while chemical sprays can be applied by machines but the chemical residues may remain on the crops which may affect the person consuming it.
With the aid of technology, intelligent AMR systems with AI and laser have been developed to help farmers rid of weeds while not using any form of herbicides. It is capable of identifying the weeds in the field, and a concentrated laser beams the weeds to the root. The intelligent AMR system with laser can operate 24/7 and eliminate up to 100,000 weeds per day.
Challenges
Though the intelligent AMR system helps solve some of the pain points farmers may encounter in the field, the challenges of deploying an intelligent AMR system under the weather remain. First, the system implemented in the intelligent AMR must withstand in-vehicle conditions such as shock and vibration; the system must also endure weather conditions like hot sunny days or wet rainy days; while in the field, the air can also get quite dusty, and this may also be a problem for the embedded system in the long run.
Solution
Our customer utilized Neousys embedded systems with AI processing power and concentrated laser technology to detect and burn the identified weed to the root. The Neousys embedded system utilizes NVIDIA inference accelerators with deep learning capabilities to identify and signal the laser mounted on the AMR to burn growing weeds on the farm.
For deployment onto an AMR that works on a farm, the Neousys system is built MIL-STD-810G certified to withstand shock and vibration. So when out in the field and moving about on the farming soil that can constantly tilt the AMR left and right, the Neousys embedded system remains unaffected. And capable of operating in true wide temperature environments, it is also unphased by the temperature discrepancies from morning to night on the open land. Last but not least, Neousys have systems that are IP67 rated for water and dustproof so they can be deployed into more demanding environments.
The combination of withstanding shock/ vibration, true wide temperature operations, water and dustproof make Neousys embedded systems the ideal choice for demanding agriculture working environments.
