Automated Drone Takes Care Of Weeds

August 10, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 38 Comments

Commercial industrial agriculture is responsible for providing food to the world’s population at an incredibly low cost, especially when compared to most of human history when most or a majority of people would have been involved in agriculture. Now it’s a tiny fraction of humans that need to grow food, while the rest can spend their time in cities and towns largely divorced from needing to produce their own food to survive. But industrial agriculture isn’t without its downsides. Providing inexpensive food to the masses often involves farming practices that are damaging to the environment, whether that’s spreading huge amounts of synthetic, non-renewable fertilizers or blanket spraying crops with pesticides and herbicides. [NathanBuildsDIY] is tackling the latter problem, using an automated drone system to systemically target weeds to reduce his herbicide use.

The specific issue that [NathanBuildsDIY] is faced with is an invasive blackberry that is taking over one of his fields. To take care of this issue, he set up a drone with a camera and image recognition software which can autonomously fly over the field thanks to Ardupilot and a LiDAR system, differentiate the blackberry weeds from other non-harmful plants, and give them a spray of herbicide. Since drones can’t fly indefinitely, he’s also build an automated landing pad complete with a battery swap and recharge station, which allows the drone to fly essentially until it is turned off and uses a minimum of herbicide in the process.

The entire setup, including drone and landing pad, was purchased for less than $2000 and largely open-source, which makes it accessible for even small-scale farmers. A depressing trend in farming is that the tools to make the work profitable are often only attainable for the largest, most corporate of farms. But a system like this is much more feasible for those working on a smaller scale and the automation easily frees up time that the farmer can use for other work. There are other ways of automating farm work besides using drones, though. Take a look at this open-source robotics platform that drives its way around the farm instead of flying.

Thanks to [PuceBaboon] for the tip!

Continue reading “Automated Drone Takes Care Of Weeds” →

AI Learns To Walk In 3D Training Grounds

July 21, 2023 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

AI agents are learning to do all kinds of interesting jobs, even the creative ones that we quite prefer handling ourselves. Nevertheless, technology marches on. Working in this area is YouTuber [AI Warehouse], who has been teaching an AI to walk in a simulated environment.

Albert needed some specific guidance to learn how to walk upright, something that humans tend to figure out innately.

The AI controls a vaguely humanoid-like creature, albeit with a heavily-simplified body and limbs. It “lives” in a 3D environment created in the Unity engine, which provides the necessary physics engine for the work. Meanwhile, the ML-Agents package is used to provide the brain for Albert, the AI charged with learning to walk.

The video steps through a variety of “deep reinforcement learning” tasks. In these, the AI is rewarded for completing goals which are designed to teach it how to walk. Albert is given control of his limbs, and simply charged with reaching a button some distance away on the floor. After many trials, he learns to do the worm, and achieves his goal.

Getting Albert to walk upright took altogether more training. Lumpy ground and walls in between him and his goal were used to up the challenge, as well as encouragements to alternate his use of each foot and to maintain an upright attitude. Over time, he was able to progress through skipping and to something approximating a proper walk cycle.

One may argue that the teaching method required a lot of specific guidance, but it’s still a neat feat to achieve nonetheless. It’s altogether more complex than learning to play Trackmania, we’d say, and that was impressive enough in itself. Video after the break.

Continue reading “AI Learns To Walk In 3D Training Grounds” →

Contrary View: Chatbots Don’t Help Programmers

June 8, 2023 by Al Williams 67 Comments

[Bertrand Meyer] is a decided contrarian in his views on AI and programming. In a recent Communications of the ACM blog post, he reveals that — unlike many others — he thinks AI in its current state isn’t very useful for practical programming. He was responding, in part, to another article from the ACM entitled “The End of Programming,” which, like many other articles, is claiming that, soon, no one will write software the way we do and have done for the last few decades. You can see [Matt Welsh] describe his thoughts on this in the video below. But [Bertrand] disagrees.

As we have also noted, [Bretrand] says:

“AI in its modern form, however, does not generate correct programs: it generates programs inferred from many earlier programs it has seen. These programs look correct but have no guarantee of correctness.”

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Prompt Injection: An AI-Targeted Attack

May 19, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

For a brief window of time in the mid-2010s, a fairly common joke was to send voice commands to Alexa or other assistant devices over video. Late-night hosts and others would purposefully attempt to activate voice assistants like these en masse and get them to do ridiculous things. This isn’t quite as common of a gag anymore and was relatively harmless unless the voice assistant was set up to do something like automatically place Amazon orders, but now that much more powerful AI tools are coming online we’re seeing that joke taken to its logical conclusion: prompt-injection attacks. Continue reading “Prompt Injection: An AI-Targeted Attack” →

3D Design With Text-Based AI

May 12, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

Generative AI is the new thing right now, proving to be a useful tool both for professional programmers, writers of high school essays and all kinds of other applications in between. It’s also been shown to be effective in generating images, as the DALL-E program has demonstrated with its impressive image-creating abilities. It should surprise no one as this type of AI continues to make in-roads into other areas, this time with a program from OpenAI called Shap-E which can render 3D images.

Like most of OpenAI’s offerings, this takes plain language as its input and can generate relatively simple 3D models with this text. The examples given by OpenAI include some bizarre models using text prompts such as a chair shaped like an avocado or an airplane that looks like a banana. It can generate textured meshes and neural radiance fields, both of which have various advantages when it comes to available computing power, training methods, and other considerations. The 3D models that it is able to generate have a Super Nintendo-style feel to them but we can only expect this technology to grow exponentially like other AI has been doing lately.

For those wondering about the name, it’s apparently a play on the 2D rendering program DALL-E which is itself a combination of the names of the famous robot WALL-E and the famous artist Salvador Dali. The Shap-E program is available for anyone to use from this GitHub page. Even though this code comes from OpenAI themselves, plenty are speculating that the AI revolution to come will largely come from open-source sources rather than OpenAI or Google, something for which the future is somewhat hazy.

Tired Of Web Scraping? Make The AI Do It

April 9, 2023 by Donald Papp 19 Comments

[James Turk] has a novel approach to the problem of scraping web content in a structured way without needing to write the kind of page-specific code web scrapers usually have to deal with. How? Just enlist the help of a natural language AI. Scrapeghost relies on OpenAI’s GPT API to parse a web page’s content, pull out and classify any salient bits, and format it in a useful way.

What makes Scrapeghost different is how data gets organized. For example, when instantiating scrapeghost one defines the data one wishes to extract. For example:

from scrapeghost import SchemaScraper
scrape_legislators = SchemaScraper(
schema={
"name": "string",
"url": "url",
"district": "string",
"party": "string",
"photo_url": "url",
"offices": [{"name": "string", "address": "string", "phone": "string"}],
}
)

The kicker is that this format is entirely up to you! The GPT models are very, very good at processing natural language, and scrapeghost uses GPT to process the scraped data and find (using the example above) whatever looks like a name, district, party, photo, and office address and format it exactly as requested.

It’s an experimental tool and you’ll need an API key from OpenAI to use it, but it has useful features and is certainly a novel approach. There’s a tutorial and even a command-line interface, so check it out.

How Much Programming Can ChatGPT Really Do?

March 25, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 50 Comments

By now we’ve all seen articles where the entire copy has been written by ChatGPT. It’s essentially a trope of its own at this point, so we will start out by assuring you that this article is being written by a human. AI tools do seem poised to be extremely disruptive to certain industries, though, but this doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing as long as they continue to be viewed as tools, rather than direct replacements. ChatGPT can be used to assist in plenty of tasks, and can help augment processes like programming (rather than becoming the programmer itself), and this article shows a few examples of what it might be used for.

AI comments are better than nothing…probably.

While it can write some programs on its own, in some cases quite capably, for specialized or complex tasks it might not be quite up to the challenge yet. It will often appear extremely confident in its solutions even if it’s providing poor or false information, though, but that doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be used at all.

The article goes over a few of the ways it can function more as an assistant than a programmer, including generating filler content for something like an SQL database, converting data from one format to another, converting programs from one language to another, and even help with a program’s debugging process.

Some other things that ChatGPT can be used for that we’ve been able to come up with include asking for recommendations for libraries we didn’t know existed, as well as asking for music recommendations to play in the background while working. Tools like these are extremely impressive, and while they likely aren’t taking over anyone’s job right now, that might not always be the case.