Self-driving farmbot kills 100,000 weeds/hour by laser: no herbicide!

The Carbon Robotics self-driving farm bot kills weeds with lasers: 8 150-watt lasers, to be precise. That’s pretty cool, but much cooler is that no toxic herbicides are required. That’s safer for the farmer, better for the soil, and produces better crops. In this episode of TechFirst, we check out the robot, talk to the CEO of Carbon Robotics Paul Mikesell, and see the results on the fields. Links: Carbon Robotics: https://carbonrobotics.com/ Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/  Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst  Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1  Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier  0:00 Laser-powered weed killer 0:47 AI, computer vision, robotics 1:48 Herbicides and weeds 3:50 Health impact and food quality 5:42 Robots with lasers 8:18 How it works 12:13 Autonomous driving 13:08 Speed and ROI 15:11 Solar powered? 17:31 Lighting and computer vision  21:21 Future of farm robots