Perhaps weedbots will soon be busy in your garden, doing the work now done by herbicides. From Klint Finley at TechCrunch:

“Blue River is designing weed elimination robots for agriculture. No, the company’s not making marijuana crop destructobots — these machines will kill the bad kind of weeds that farmers would otherwise use chemicals, or a legion of weed pullers, to destroy. Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla claims that Blue River’s technology can reduce herbicide use in the U.S. by 250 million pounds a year.

Blue River was founded by Stanford alumni Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden. To make it work, the team has done extensive development of machine vision algorithms for recognizing different types of plants. It’s one of the most ambitious applications of machine vision I’ve seen.”