If they were able to make drones work, it could open up more variable farm designs: rows are mostly necessary so that farms can be serviced by vehicles.
Polyculture farming could become much more economically feasible if drones could weed out all non-whitelisted species.
Would also be a great boon to forestry: would be awesome to make a bunch of drones to fly through forests and zap any non-native invasive species it sees.
>If they were able to make drones work, it could open up more variable farm designs: rows are mostly necessary so that farms can be serviced by vehicles.
Sure, but the weedkiller isn't the only vehicle that needs to work on the farm. I don't think flying drones are going to be ploughing any time soon.
Yes, let's put powerful lasers on drones flown by AI. What could happen? I just hope the human recognition model doesn't shoot more of one race than another.
I'll bet there's creative solutions that could take advantage of a hub and spoke model. Picture a solar recharging base station that drones can dock with to charge while others rotate in.
Drones don't need to be battery operated - but, I agree that there is no reason to use them in fields which are already designed for vehicle access with semi-standardized dimensions.
There's probably something to be said for hard-wired drones here. The weight of the cable is something you have to contend with, but with a physical wire you can run a larger drone longer.
Given that the plants are on the ground, I imagine not sweeping over them with an extension cable would be an obvious advantage. Still, you could work with suspended powerlines as easily for the big-box drone as with tractors, which brings me to another (probably dumb) question: Why has nobody built a landline electric tractor?
Farmers sweep things along the field all the time. The standard farming sprinkler is supplied by pipes / hoses which are bridged above crop height between wheeled towers. As the spinkler works its way in a circle on the field around the water supply, the towers roll over a negligible amount of crop.
Farms are designed to be serviced by farm vehicles. A vehicle makes a lot of sense.