Carbon Robotics Announces Large Plant Model for Instant Plant Identification
Carbon Robotics has introduced the Large Plant Model (LPM), an artificial intelligence model that enables agricultural robots to recognize and eliminate new weeds without the need for labeling or retraining.
AI Becomes the Farmer's Eye
Traditionally, farmers decided which plant was a weed and needed to be eradicated. Seattle-based Carbon Robotics announced it has developed a new AI model that could fundamentally change this process. The system, called the 'Large Plant Model' (LPM), serves as the brain for the LaserWeeder, an autonomous robot fleet that clears weeds with lasers.
Trained on 150 Million Images
The company's founder and CEO, Paul Mikesell, stated that LPM was trained on over 150 million labeled plant photos and data points collected from its robots operating on more than 100 farms across 15 countries worldwide. Thanks to this massive dataset, the model can instantly identify and classify a plant species it has never seen before.
Mikesell explained that before this new model, when a new weed species appeared on a farm or the same weed emerged with a slightly different appearance in different soil, it took about 24 hours to create new data labels to retrain the machines. With LPM, this process becomes instantaneous. The farmer can directly tell the machine what to destroy and what to preserve by selecting photos collected by the robot from its user interface.
AI Increases Efficiency in Agriculture
This move by Carbon Robotics demonstrates that AI is playing an increasingly deep role in agricultural technology (AgTech). At a time when AI investments are reaching record levels globally, the concrete application areas of these technologies are also expanding. The company has secured over $185 million in venture capital funding from investors such as Nvidia NVentures and Bond to date.
The new model will be delivered to existing systems via a software update. Carbon Robotics aims to further refine the model as its robots continue to feed new data into LPM. This development holds the potential to reduce pesticide use and increase resource efficiency in agriculture. While the impacts of AI in sectors like finance are debated, this concrete application in a fundamental field like agriculture highlights the technology's contribution to productivity.
