Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/23/a-roomba-for-weeds.html
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weeds are short, plants are tall.
They don’t know my garden.
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To heck with this crap, where’s my lawn mowing robot?
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The shear joy of ripping out the weed[s] by its roots is enough satisfaction to keep me doing it regardless of my knees many complaints.
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They’ve been a thing for a while now.
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That little robot looks like it just pooped out a plant.
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This achieves the ultimate goal of nearly a half century of robotics development: a robotic hoe.
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I see what you did there! 
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I don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-vegetable garden with rows of bare dirt.
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this thing will miss every weed that grows closer than X to your plants…
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I first read the title as "A Roomba for marijuana’.
that would have ben shiny.
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Looks like it would take some pretty smooth ground to function.
This weed robot is not going to kill off dandelions. Nor anything with any significant taproot.
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I’m going to put this into my enemies’ seedbeds every spring.
Yeah. Cuts a weed at its base? If it does that regularly over the course of many months, maybe you’ll get rid of that weed. If the robot is not as diligent, you’ll just end up with a weed with many more sprouts popping up everywhere.
Weeds are weeds for a reason: they are damn good at growing in adverse conditions. Losing its stem now and then is nothing to a weed.
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When I used to own a house, the most persistent weed I had in my backyard was wild mint. There was never enough demand for mojitos to make harvesting it worthwhile and it would only make my lawn mower smell nice afterwards. It is insanely impossible to eradicate. I still can’t believe people grow the stuff on purpose.
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My yard is plagued with its sister plant, lemon balm, as well as wild violets. I’ve made some inroads on the violets, but I will never be free of the lemon balm. I practically shreak when I see them selling it down at the Depot. That and catnip, also in the mint family, though at least with that, you get cats.
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Just what I needed. A bunch of feral cats getting stoned on my lawn.
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If someone made one of these that only knew how to patrol a lawn and cut out young dandelions you would sell a lot of them in Seattle.
It is also cut the grass… which it might have to do to keep it short enough so it can operate well… yea.
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