First agricultural revolution – ~12000BC

Second agricultural revolution – 18th&19th Century

Current situation
• High dependency on fossil fuels What’s next?
• High dependency on chemicals Sustainable Agriculture
• Advanced genetics for increased crop yield
• Fast growing human population
Weed control is a fundamental operation for any crop to maintain high yields

90% is performed chemically

Large machinery
• Oil consumption
• CO2 emission

Weeding alternatives
• Mechanical weeding (Hoeing machine) – Not efficient
• Manual weeding – 10 times more expensive
Untargeted application…
• >90% wasted → high costs
• Toxic residues on soil, water, crop → health & environment impact
• Damage on crops → 5-10 % yield losses in average

…of selective herbicides

• New molecules expensive to develop ($350M1)
• Increased legal pressure to ban molecules & reduce quantity
• Development of herbicide-resistant weeds (+10%/year2)

1 Phillips McDougall, 2015

2 “Global Increase in Unique Resitant Cases”, Dr Ian Heap, Weedscience.org, 2016
Autonomous weeding / navigation
• Minimal human intervention

Solar powered
• Sustainable energy & Power autonomy

AI for weed detection

Robotic arms for precision spraying

• Same efficiency up to 40% cheaper
• No chemicals on crops
• Up to 20 times less herbicide
• Allows cheaper & ecological molecules
• Reduces herbicide-resistant weeds problem
Solar panels, 350 W max

Delta robotic arms

Electric motors, 0.5 m/s speed

GPS & IMU for navigation

RGB Camera, 5 MP @10 fps

Jetson TK1 (TX2) for CV & ML

Weed detection @ >1 fps

 Row Finder Pipeline

Plants Row
Image Downscaling
Segmentation Finder

Camera Settings
Adjustment
&
Image Acquisition Weed Detect Pipeline

Plants Feature
Classification
Segmentation Extraction

Send weed positions Map weed positions

Post-processing
& sizes to arms to robot coord.
 Row Finder Pipeline

Plants Row
Image Downscaling
Segmentation Finder

Camera Settings
Adjustment
&
Image Acquisition Weed Detect Pipeline

Plants Feature
Classification
Segmentation Extraction

Send weed positions Map weed positions

Post-processing
& sizes to arms to robot coord.
Plant Pre-Segmentation JETSON TK1 JETSON TX2
CPU GPU CPU GPU

Color Space Conversion 424.6 ± 18.1 55.6 ±1.86 130.9 ± 27.9 36.7 ± 10.8

Color Normalization 107.2 ± 2.6 0.41 ± 1.21 79.9 ± 15.7 0.21 ± 0.71

Gaussian Smoothing 208.9 ± 6.1 41.3 ± 8.9 196.7 ± 6.4 14.7 ± 4.92
Overall 881.3 ± 20 98.45 ± 9.1 517.3 ± 42.4 51.8 ± 14.1

(Mean Computation Times over 90 images in ms)

 PROTOTYPE 1 PROTOTYPE 2
HW: JETSON TK1 HW: JETSON TX2
Hand-crafted Features DNN
AdaBoost Classifier DNN
 PROTOTYPE 1 PROTOTYPE 2

HW: JETSON TK1 HW: JETSON TX2

Hand-crafted Features DNN

AdaBoost Classifier DNN

Set 1 – Seen field OA = 92% F1=0.87 OA = 92.2% F1=0.867

(w.r. 33.9%) Prec. = 97.2% Rec. = 78.3% Prec. = 96.3% Rec. = 78.8%

Set 2 – Seen field OA = 97.8% F1=0.77 OA = 97.8% F1=0.78

(w.r. 5.6%) Prec. = 94.4% Rec. = 65.6% Prec. = 87.3% Rec. = 70.5%

OA = Overall Binary Accuracy, F1 = Mean F-Score

Prec. = Weed detection precision, Rec. = Weed detection recall
w.r. = Weed / (Weed + Crop) pixels ratio
Effects of Shadow on Color & Visibility
Illumination Changes due to daytime & weather

10am 6pm
 Soil & Crop Variation

Field 1 Field 2
 PROTOTYPE 1 PROTOTYPE 2

HW: JETSON TK1 HW: JETSON TX2

Hand-crafted Features DNN

AdaBoost Classifier DNN

Mixed Set – Unseen Fields OA = 79.4% F1=0.531 OA = 92.5% F1=0.863

(w.r. : 23.4%) Prec. = 56.7% Rec. = 49.9% Prec. = 86.5% Rec. = 86.1%

OA = Overall Binary Accuracy, F1 = Mean F-Score

Prec. = Weed detection precision, Rec. = Weed detection recall
w.r. = Weed / (Weed + Crop) pixels ratio
 JETSON TK1 – JETSON TX2 – Jetson TX2 –
Feat. Extraction + AdaBoost Feat. Extraction + Adaboost Deep Learning (CNN)

987.1 ± 523.7 ms
744 ± 503.4 ms 634.5±393.5 ms
After Optimization
780 ± 447.6 ms

Full Pipeline Full Pipeline Full Pipeline

977.4 ± 511.9 ms 833.8 ± 397.6 ms 879 ± 457.5 ms

(Mean Computation Time over 20 images)

Real-life embedded GPU application that can improve food production

First completely autonomous weeding robot

NVIDIA Jetson TX2 opens new frontiers for embedded platforms

Deep Learning is powerful, but it is no magic wand

Challenging to obtain images covering all situations

Contact: Anıl Yüce
anil.yuce@ecorobotix.com