Weed Killer Drones

A drone killing on home soil is a hotly debated topic but in truth drones already are. They are involved in committing precision hits….on weeds. Using drones to map weed concentrations in Denmark helps reduce the use of weed killers by concentrating it were it is needed most. The drone flies over the field with a camera that looks for reflective signatures of weeds and crops. Using the light spectrum, the camera identifies which type of plant absorbs different concentrations of lights and identifies it as crop or weed and records the information by sending it to a central computer which in turn sends out a ground vehicle to look at where the “weed signal” is most concentrated so they can just expend herbicide in one particular area both reducing the amount of herbicide that has to be used and eliminating the needless over-spraying of an entire field. The only necessary human intervention is the identification of the boundaries of the field. Other uses can include information regarding soil nutrition, plant growth stages, and pest infestations. Of course, (no pun intended), there are a lot of bugs to work out first including conflict with the regulatory agencies. We can only hope that the good ideas take root and the bad ones get weeded out.