A unique AI-powered project focussed on helping farmers to manage blackgrass has now concluded, culminating in a method for precision control.

The work, conducted by Bosch and partners, involved utilising high-tech cameras mounted to a sprayer boom to not only detect blackgrass in cereal crops, but the individual growth stage of each weed. The aim was to enable spot application of herbicides.

The project

First steps involved devising a method to correctly identify blackgrass, achieved by training cameras and an AI algorithm, supported by Rothamsted Research. Then, the technology was installed on a Chafer Machinery sprayer, resulting in a fully-equipped boom with 28 cameras.

Peter Frankland, application engineer at Bosch says it was a truly collaborative project. “The agronomic part of the process was managed by BASF Digital Farming, using its xarvio digital farming solutions platform to generate customised maps for use by the Chafer sprayer, and to determine the herbicide dose and type.

“Rothamsted Research provided understanding of types of cultivation that farmers use and some methods of solving blackgrass without using crop protection. We worked together to ensure the best possible outcome,” he explains.

Challenges

To confirm the efficacy of the technology, quadrants were used for manual weed counts. However, one of the most challenging aspects of the project, which was funded by Innovate UK, was training the AI, says Bosch’s Muhammad Kassem.

“At the start we didn’t have anything to benchmark this against. As we progressed through the project the model became much more mature to the point where we could detect blackgrass on unseen images with a high level of accuracy.

“Overall, we scanned around 5000 images, covering a variety of different seasons and crops, not only wheat, but also barley. We used coding to clean up the images, another code to convert them to the right file format, and a final code to train the AI algorithm.

“It was a fantastic project and we’ve come out of it with good accuracy and that’s the key measure.”