In my capacity as not-a-lawyer-or-your-lawyer I’d advise you to be very careful with anything that has Intellectual Ventures’ fingerprints on it; but their mosquito-terminating laser is pretty nifty.
I imagine that, in the gardening case, the real challenge would be getting line of sight to all the various leaf surfaces; both for the tracking camera and to avoid shooting little laser holes in any leaves that block access to the target. Conventional diode lasers of no particular merit are now powerful enough to be lethal to insects however, so if you can get an ID and a clear shot it’d be pretty doable.
