AI meets Central Coast agriculture with robot that snips weeds and cultivates fields

SALINAS, CA. (KION-TV): Advancements in technology have opened the door to providing more help for farm workers on the central coast.

It may look like something out of Transformers-- but this AI-assisted autonomous robot, named "Titan" is meant to snip weeds and for cultivating. Titan can take up to 1,000 weeds per minute.

"With farm wise, with our robots, we leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision, and we detect the crops that we're in and then we're able to weed around that crop and taking out all the troublesome weeds in the fields. said Paul Elliott, Sales and Customer Experience Manager for Farm Wise.

The robot farmers aren't expected to have an impact on jobs for humans-- if anything it might help them out.

"If anything, it's going to promote growth in companies for better positions for some folks, more ergonomic work, you know, on a tractor versus bent over with it with a hand hoe all day," said Wise.

Weeding is a task that farmers typically do in the fields-- but these robots are meant to help in those tasks and local farmers are all on board with it.

Yadira Mentiola works the fields and said clipping weeds is a very tedious thing to do-- and very painful.

"It's a very tough thing for us to be working crouched for 8-10 hours," said Mentiola. "And these types of robots will help us a lot."

You can see an explanation of how Titan works, here.

FarmWise said they will have another artificial intelligence robot that will also work on the fields-- it might even work faster than Titan. However, it won't be available until October.