Weeding robots can sometimes struggle to tell weeds from crops, but genetically modifying the plants we want to keep to make them brightly coloured would make the job easier, suggest a group of researchers
By Matthew Sparkes
17 April 2024
Changing the colour of crops could make it easier to distinguish desired plants from weeds
John Martin – Fotografo/Alamy
Common crops, like wheat or maize, could be genetically altered to be brightly coloured to make it easier for weeding robots to do their job, suggest researchers.
Weeding reduces the need for herbicides, but the artificial intelligence models that power weeding robots can struggle to differentiate between crops and weeds that are a similar shape and colour.
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To get round this problem, Pedro Correia at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and his colleagues have suggested that crop genomes could be adapted to express pigments such as anthocyanins, which make blueberries blue, or carotenoids, which make carrots orange.
Crops could also be grown to have unusually shaped leaves or to have characteristics that are invisible to the naked eye but detectable by sensors, such as in the infrared spectrum, they say.
Correia says AI’s struggles with weeding could be exacerbated as wild species are adapted for agriculture to capitalise on their abilities to cope with a changing climate. This type of novel domestication can create crops that are more environmentally sustainable and higher yielding, but they may also be harder to distinguish from their unchanged ancestors.