Seminar: Asher Bender, 4th June, 1p

When: Thurs 4th of June, 1p

Where: This seminar will be presented online, RSVP here.

Speaker: Dr Asher Bender

Title: Intelligent Robotic Non-Chemical Weeding

Abstract: In this seminar I will present results from an industry research project with the Grains Research and Development Corporation: Intelligent Robotic Non-Chemical Weeding. Weeds compete with crop for nutrients, water and sun light. Controlling weeds and lost revenue is estimated to cost grain growers $3.3 billion a year. Early reliance on herbicides as a complete weed control solution has made contemporary weed management a challenge due to the increasing prevalence of herbicide resistant weeds. An emerging tool in weed management and precision agriculture is site-specific weed management. In site-specific weed management, individual weeds are detected and targeted by a control method. Since this task cannot be solved with a purely mechanical system, it is only feasible at a small scale and requires a large amount of human labour. Robotic systems combined with computer vision and machine learning hold the potential to change the scalability and labour costs of site-specific weed management. Currently commercial robotic site-specific weed management is limited to fallow land where infra-red reflectance can be used to perform ‘green-on-brown’ detection. In this research project, the goal is to extend autonomous weeding capabilities to ‘green-on-green’ detection – that is, detecting weeds amongst crop.  

Bio: Dr Asher Bender is a post-doctoral researcher at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. His research interest is in applying machine learning to solve high-level problems using data collected by autonomous systems. He has worked in marine robotics, intelligent transportation and is currently doing research in agricultural robotics.