Strategic Elements Ltd (ASX:SOR) subsidiary Stealth Technologies has achieved considerable improvements to its weed detection technology in a filip for the global agricultural industry.
Stealth has been working on sophisticated weed detection technology alongside collaboration partners Australian Herbicide Resistance Initiative and the University of Western Australia School of Agriculture and Environment.
Now, Stealth has reported a dramatic size and weight reduction for its sensor hardware and an upgrade to its proprietary software and algorithms.
Changing agriculture, defence, mining and more
Strategic Elements executive director Elliot Nicholls said Stealth’s improvements were a validation of the company’s automation and robotics platform, AxV.
“The Stealth team has been working incredibly hard to advance the AxV Platform,” he said.
“We are in active discussions with multiple companies on potential deployments of the AxV platform across security, defence, agriculture, mining and other sectors.”
Weed detection tech improvements
The spread of weeds is a major issue for crop yields globally, where production losses are estimated in the tens of billions and weeds are becoming increasingly resistant to herbicides.
Stealth has dramatically reduced the size and weight of its sensor hardware to enable sensors to be installed on a range of farm equipment such as boom sprayers or utes and even potentially drones in addition to the header of a combine harvester.
Meanwhile, its proprietary software and algorithms have been upgraded to enable weeds to be detected in crops other than wheat, such as barley; improvements have also been made to system design to allow the assembly of composite point cloud, enabling superior processing and delivering higher weed detection accuracy.
Further on-farm testing and optimisation of the hardware and software upgrades will be conducted during August; results are expected during September.
If successful, the technology will likely be included in an expanded trial to be conducted in November 2021, which will see up to 10 farms utilise the Stealth technology solution during the harvesting season.
Weed detection in agriculture
The estimated cost of weeds in Australian cropping systems alone is an estimated $3.3 billion annually; in the US that figure balloons to $US34.5 billion.
Currently available advanced weed detection technologies typically use RGB cameras and different forms of imaging that distinguish weeds and crops via colour, which has limitations in broadacre cropping where weeds are often the same colour as crops.
More chemicals are being used, due to weeds’ increasing resistance to herbicides, and production loss is continually creeping up.
This is where Strategic Elements and Stealth Technologies come in; previous trials have shown the AxV technology was able to detect 100% of weeds with a height threshold of 20 centimetres above crop canopy.
Significantly, the technology was able to detect weeds from the barley crop, notwithstanding the fact that both were brown in colour and barely distinguishable to the human eye.
- Daniel Paproth