What is and isn’t a weed that needs to be eliminated in the field is determined by the eyes of the farmer — and now, increasingly, by a new AI model from Carbon Robotics.
Seattle-based Carbon Robotics, which builds the LaserWeeder — a robot fleet that uses lasers to kill weeds — announced a new AI model, the Large Plant Model (LPM), on Monday. This model recognizes plant species instantly and allows farmers to target new weeds without needing to retrain the robots.
The LPM is trained on more than 150 million photos and data points collected by the company’s machines across the more than 100 farms in 15 countries where the robots currently operate. The model now powers Carbon AI, the AI system that serves as the brains inside the company’s autonomous weed-killing robots.
Paul Mikesell, the founder and CEO of Carbon Robotics, told TechCrunch that prior to LPM, every time a new type of weed would show up on a farm — or even the same type of weed in different soil or with a slightly different appearance — the company would have to create new data labels to retrain its machines to recognize the plant.
This process took about 24 hours each time, Mikesell said. Now, LPM can learn a new weed instantly, even if it’s never seen it before.
“The farmer can live in real time and say, ‘Hey, this is a new weed. I want you to kill this,’ and that was something that had never been done before,” Mikesell said. “There’s no new labeling or retraining because the Large Plant Model understands, at a much deeper level, what it’s looking at and the type of plant.”
Mikesell said that the company, which was founded in 2018, started developing this m …