Every morning, Anicet Mbida gives us the very best in terms of innovation.

This Wednesday, he talks about a robot that can eradicate weeds with a laser.

An interesting solution for farms wishing to operate without pesticides but still very expensive.

Your innovation of the day may finally make you forget Roundup, glyphosate and the like.

These are robots capable of removing weeds, one by one, with a laser.

This will be of interest to organic farmers, since we no longer use any chemicals and no herbicides.

We work the old-fashioned way, destroying each weed by hand.

Except that there, fortunately, it is a robot who takes care of it.

You have to imagine a sort of autonomous tractor with cameras and image recognition algorithms.

We let him patrol the field.

As soon as it spots a weed, it burns it very precisely to the heart with a laser, to prevent it from growing back.

Advantage: we do not impact the ground.

On the contrary, the destroyed grass will decompose and provide it with its nutrients.

I imagine it must cost a lot more than a good old hoe ...

Yes, several hundred thousand euros unfortunately.

So it will still take several years to make it profitable.

You should know that today, many organic farmers have no other solution than to weed by hand.

This is why large farms are difficult to make profitable.

This kind of machine could perhaps be a game changer.

They operate 24 hours a day and easily replace around fifteen people.

Are they already on the market?

Yes, it's just starting for the American robot from Carbon Robotics, the one who grills weeds with a laser. We are still waiting for that of the English RootWave who will use an electric brand. This is a new example of what is called precision farming. I have already told you about it. It's very trendy right now: to use technology to precisely treat each plant, each leaf, to avoid all these spills that ruin the soil.