A short review of the environmental impact of automated weed control

Abstract

Agricultural food production is in constant struggle to meet the market demands. Weed control is used to increase the per land unit production from agricultural field. The process of weed removal is usually performed manually and is a time-consuming and labor demanding task. Since mechanical removal is a difficult process, the plantations use herbicides to remove unwanted plants. Herbicides are applied in large quantities, thus often have a degenerative effect on the land. Sometimes, they even endanger the health of the workers who apply them and the end users which consume the harvested product. We review the technologies used for automated weed control and its environmental impact, specifically on the pollution reduction. We also review the herbicides reduction reported in implemented and tested approaches for precision agriculture with emphasis on the weed control environmental impact. Based on the reviewed papers, we conclude that automated weed detection can identify unwanted plants with decent accuracy. Consequently, this can facilitate building autonomous spraying systems that can significantly reduce the quantity of applied herbicides by precisely applying the chemicals only on the plants or mechanically removing unwanted plants. We also review the challenges that need to be overcome, such as precise weed plant type detection, speed of the process and some security considerations that arise from the involvement of information and communication technologies.