Agriculture is becoming a lot more hi-tech these days, with farmers embracing all kinds of new technologies to enhance yields and drive down costs. A number of tech start-ups have been aggressively pushing their products in the agricultural sector, with apps for monitoring cattle stocks and soil conditions just some of the tools available to farmers.

But one of the biggest concerns, for both farmers and consumers alike, is agriculture’s use of herbicides to kill off those troublesome weeds which prevent crops from properly maturing. The problem is two-fold: herbicides are expensive for the farmers to use, while we don’t need to remind you about the health concerns of spraying such potent chemicals on our food.

Enter a new start-up, Blue River Technology, to tackle the problem. Blue River, which has just secured funding to the tune of $3.1 million, is developing robots to take over our gardening – machines that can plough their way across a field, pulling up all of those nasty weeds that are threatening the farmer’s crops, and saving him from the expense and dangers of spraying chemicals on them instead.

According to Khosla Ventures, the investment firm that’s recently given its backing to Blue River, the technology has the potential to save farmers an estimated $250 million each year on herbicides. Another advantage is that there are plenty of weeds that have developed a resistance to the chemicals farmers use to kill them – standing up to a robot will be a tough proposition for even the hardiest of weeds.

Blue River’s robots employ some pretty smart technology to do the job of human weed pickers. It’s onboard computers are equipped with a camera and loaded with three different algorithms. The first identifies what is a plant and what isn’t; the second determines which plants are weeds and which are crops; while the third decides the correct moment in which to inject a dose of deadly fertilizer to kill the weed, as this happens outside of the view of the robot.

Robot’s eye view

The prototype robots have so far been designed for lettuce thinning, and are being tested out at one of the biggest lettuce farms in the US, but now that Blue River has received some serious financial backing, it’s surely only a matter of time until their robotic farmhands take over the countryside.