With Investment from NVIDIA’s NVentures, Carbon Robotics Takes Greater Leap into AI-Powered Farming Solutions

Let’s talk about a.) Carbon Robotics, and b.) why harnessing IoT for farming, agriculture tech (or “agtech”) and agribusiness-centric goals is important. (A topic I’ve covered in the past with stories like solar IoT solutions and livestock tracking support for farmers via nanosatellites.)

“Protecting Crops, People, & Our Planet” is the Carbon Robotics M.O., and we’re here for it. This M.O. is why Carbon sees farms as controllable environments serving global markets; after all, growing food is a fundamental and universal activity that we do for one another. Since farmers are too often forced to choose between using an immense amount of increasingly scarce (and costly, frankly) by-hand labor, chemical/herbicide sprays or the use of mechanical solutions that disrupt or even destroy topsoil, teams like Carbon’s know it won’t be long before these tactics begin losing sustainable lasting power.

“Farmers are eager for an option that offers immediate economic savings, results in healthier higher quality crops, and that is sustainable and regenerative for the future,” one Carbon Robotics representative wrote.

This is why – by building farms and food systems of the future with on-par support from today’s farmers, Carbon’s IoT ecosystem of services, in the company’s own words, “reimagine how we produce food by leveraging the power of robotics, computer learning, lasers, deep learning and AI.” Carbon’s systems precisely identify, weed and thin specialty vegetable crops using lasers with millimeter-level accuracy. These systems also proactively observe the conditions of field crops and soil for further analysis, leading to necessary reductions in herbicide usage and deployments of weeding crews that often entail 75+ people per field (given the fact that utilizing tech to tend the farms more responsibly is an accessible option). Carbon’s AI and deep learning solutions are capable of labeling more than 8 million crops and weed images that delineate between individual weeds and healthy crops; this makes real-time pathing for tractors smarter, maximizing crop health and yields per acre.

And in the vein of smart decisions being made, NVentures – the venture capital arm of none other than NVIDIA – has officially chosen to invest in Carbon Robotics.

The importance of this is clear; NVentures’ action underscores its faith in Carbon Robotics, given NVIDIA’s already extensive foray into all things AI.

Moreover, by leveraging the power of 24 NVIDIA GPUs, Carbon Robotics’ LaserWeeder (which has already been proven by top farmers to reduce weed control costs by 80%) can process 4.7 million higher-resolution images per hour, leading to the eradication of approximately 5,000 weeds per minute as it harnesses a hyperfast-growing agricultural image dataset.

Paul Mikesell, founder and CEO of Carbon Robotics, has since stated that “With this investment, and using the power of AI, we can help farmers create farms and food systems of the future that are more productive, efficient, healthy, and profitable.”

Better steps towards a healthier future sounds good to us, readers.

Learn more about Carbon Robotics’ capabilities here.