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This is how the robots get them into your home: a robot dog that kills weeds in your garden by roasting them with a flamethrower.
Ever since it was announced last year that a company had begun producing a robot dog with a flamethrower built into it called Thermonator, we wondered how that could possibly be a good thing.
Now, according to a new paper published on the arXiv pre-print server, that “good thing” is apparently using a robot dog with a flamethrower mounted on it to… kill weeds?
“Robotic weed flaming is a new and environmentally friendly approach to weed removal in the agricultural field,” researcher Dezhen Song at Texas A&M University and his colleagues claim.
“Using a mobile manipulator equipped with a flamethrower, we design a new system and algorithm to enable effective weed flaming, which requires robotic manipulation with a soft and deformable end effector, as the thermal coverage of the flame is affected by dynamic or unknown environmental factors such as gravity, wind, atmospheric pressure, fuel tank pressure, and pose of the nozzle.
“System development includes overall design, hardware integration, and software pipeline. To enable precise weed removal, the greatest challenge is to detect and predict dynamic flame coverage in real time before motion planning, which is quite different from a conventional rigid gripper in grasping or a spray gun in painting.”
They claim that using these flame-throwing robot dogs could be a better alternative to herbicides that cause environmental problems and will kill so called “superweeds” that evolve to resist those same herbicides.
In five trials, their robot dog was able to use its flamethrower with an average of 95 percent of the flame being focused on the weed.
Not happy with just burning the weeds, the scientists are also planning on equipping their robot dog with an electrocution device capable of shocking the weeds with more than 10,000 volts. (Are we sure this is just for weeds?)
And here we thought a robot using a laser to kill cockroaches was only a “little dangerous.”