A laser weeder is 9 parts and 5 steps.
A young weed can look almost the same as the crop, and the machine has to find it and hit a growing point a few millimetres across while it keeps moving.
- Gantry frame and wheel drives
- Light-sealed hood
- Laser modules
- Weed cameras and lighting
- Compute and uplink
- Generator and power distribution
- Chiller and radiator
- Row guidance
- Safety chain
Every step is a part doing its job, and each one can fail on its own.
Follow one piece of work through the machine. Device to Cloud Flywheel connects the robot from its first field run: one command registers it, and its heartbeats, logs and recordings come home from then on.
Light
Inside the closed hood, LED bars light the bed the same way at noon and at dusk.
See
The downward camera beside one laser takes a frame of the bed.
Decide
The computer on the deck runs the weed model on the frame, marks the weed, and finds its growing point, the few millimetres where a shot kills the plant.
Aim
The computer predicts where the weed will be when it reaches the laser row and turns the steering mirror in one laser module to that spot.
Fire
With the hood interlock showing the hood closed, the laser fires and the mirror puts the beam on the growing point.
The robot works. Running thousands of them is the unknown.
Thousands of laser weeders record more than any team can watch. What they see in the field is also what makes the next model better, if it comes home.
Log
The machine records video of the bed in short segments, whether or not anyone is watching.
Device to Cloud Flywheel: Cameras and vision devices
Return
When the link allows, the machine uploads its recorded segments.
Device to Cloud Flywheel: A ROS 2 robot
Learn
The fleet's records, this weed among them, are the raw material for the next model.
Device to Cloud Flywheel: Training a policy and shipping it to the fleet
Ship
The new model goes out as a declaration of what each machine should run.
Device to Cloud Flywheel: Training a policy and shipping it to the fleet
$ dcfctl device list | head -7
ID NAME STATUS DEVICE-TYPE AGENT-VERSION
gh2-weeder-01 bed-row-a active weeder v1.4.2
gh2-weeder-02 bed-row-b active weeder v1.4.2
gh2-weeder-03 bed-row-c active weeder v1.4.2
gh2-weeder-04 bed-row-d active weeder v1.4.2
gh2-weeder-05 bed-row-e active weeder v1.4.1
gh2-weeder-06 bed-row-f active weeder v1.4.2
$ dcfctl device telemetry gh2-weeder-05 | jq '{gpu_percent, temp_c}'
{
"gpu_percent": 71,
"temp_c": 57
}
$ dcfctl device run gh2-weeder-05 'systemctl is-active weed-detector'
activeA made-up fleet of laser weeders, printed the way dcfctl prints it.
Back to 01 light, with the new model.
That loop is the product. Device to Cloud Flywheel brings the recordings home, hands the ones your team picks to your trainer, and ships the new model out in stages with pause and rollback. What to train on and when to ship stay your team's call.
Get startedLearn how the laser weeder is built, part by part