Making humans healthy and cleaner again.

It hates weeds, but loves crops. Meet the autonomous weeder.

An autonomous robot that helps your crops grow healthier, increase the farmers profits and can adapt to different crops. A San Francisco based company FarmWise builds autonomous robots that can weed your farm 24/7. The robot drives down a row of crops, identifies weeds and automatically plucks them out. Yes, it does not use any pesticides or chemicals.

Historically, humans have been using chemicals to kill weeds thus creating a huge health and safety issue. Fortunately, we have robots from FarmWise to save us. We have reached a point where we don’t need companies like Monsanto and chemicals like Roundup to pollute our crops and cause cancer.

The giant robot farmer (has no name yet, perhaps Enemyofweeds might do it justice) uses Artificial Intelligence to identify crops at various growing stages and determine the weeds from the actual lettuce of cauliflower. The company said they leveraged algorithms like the ones used by Google and Facebook to identify different crops and weeds.

FarmWise has deployed two robots so far but they believe this is a long term solution to the need of cleaner crops and demand for healthier diets. The costs associated with using a weeder robot is also much less than spraying a field and so it’s a win-win situation for the farmer and the consumer.

The company has recently raised 5.7 Million of "seed" money so they are preparing to ramp up their production and investments. Naturally they are hiring so anyone interested is encouraged to reach out to them.

Hate trashy rivers? Meet Trashbot!

This robot can be found in Chicago river cleaning up after the humans. The cool thing about Trashbot is that anyone with an internet connection (globally) can use Trashbot and clean an area of the Chicago River. This places the responsibility in your hands if you happen to be near some trash by the Chicago River...or even if you're 10,000 miles away. No more excuses!

Trashbot was created by a Chicago based startup Urban Rivers, a group of like minded roboticists, ecologists, geeks and other good-hearted people that care about their river.

Nick Wesley, one of the good people behind the projects says “Trashbot lets people take control of the robot to clean up trash, be responsible and at the same time have a really cool experience”.

The idea came about a few years ago when Urban Rivers created Chicago's Floating Gardens.

Just like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the Aztec's Floating Gardens, the Floating Gardens in Chicago was built with a goal of restoring natural habitat for the geese and birds and fish in the river. The crappy part is the gardens quickly got clogged up with trash and so then...as always a solution to a solution..Trashbot was born.

Building an autonomous robot to clean up trash can be challenging even with recent advancement in AI and computer vision. What is trash? Very difficult questions for an AI to identify and answer. And so the Urban River team decided to let the human decide and give control of Trashbot to anyone with an internet connection.

On a side note...humans just keep plundering and trashing and doing things that nature doesn’t like. We need to clean up after ourselves or this beautiful home we call Earth is not going to be happy with us.

See Trashbot in action.

 Trash is everywhere so lets clean it out! This is a public announcement.

Here is another Trashbot by Clean Robotics. They use AI to sort trash.  

You can build your own trasher with the Micro.

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