‘Like science fiction,’ Seattle startup sends laser-equipped robots to zap weeds on farmland By Heidi Groover, The Seattle Times Published: April 18, 2021, 3:33pm Share: When vegetable farmer Shay Myers needs to weed 30 acres of organic onions, he’s typically hired a crew of around 30 people for a day of work that can be tedious, including sometimes using pocket knives to carve away weeds around the onions. This season, he hopes to use two robots instead. Myers is an early user of a Seattle-based robotics company’s “autonomous weeder,” a tractor-sized machine that uses lasers to kill weeds. The first sight of the machine in a field of crops “was like science fiction,” said Myers, who grows hundreds of acres of onions, asparagus, sweet potatoes and other vegetables in Idaho and Oregon. He expects the machines “should pay for themselves in two or three years.”