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Better Farming Ontario Featured Articles

Better Farming Ontario magazine is published 11 times per year. After each edition is published, we share featured articles online.


Robot weeder is on the way

Monday, December 3, 2012

It started out as a robot that would cut the grass in urban parks. Somebody thought that spinning blades were a bad idea with kids and dogs on leashes around, and so the idea evolved into an automated lettuce weeder, according to The Economist magazine.

The electric-powered Lettuce 'Bot, brainchild of Stanford University-trained engineers Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden, takes pictures of passing lettuce plants, compares them to a database of more than one million images of lettuce taken from all possible angles and instantly decides if they should live or die. A shot of concentrated fertilizer out the back end kills weeds and the remaining lettuce gets a growth blast as well. A version of the machine, currently under development, aimed at organic lettuce producers, favours those old spinning blades.

The makers promise that the robots will be cost-competitive with hand weeding. BF

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December 2025

Better Farming Magazine

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