Four founders of companies on the tech frontier got together this week at a Seattle conference for a show-and-tell about the hardware at the heart of their businesses. And like any good show-and-tell, their talks touched on strategy as well as gadgetry.
For example, consider the laser-powered weed zapper pioneered by Seattle-based Carbon Robotics. The LaserWeeder system takes advantage of optical sensors and artificial intelligence to identify and target the weeds among the crops as the robotic rig is pulled through a field. Carbon Robotics’ founder and CEO, Paul Mikesell, held up one of the LaserWeeder’s scanners during Monday’s DeepTech session at the downtown office of K&L Gates.
“We have it set up so this camera can see exactly what the laser shooting this way is going to hit, and every time we turn on that laser, the same pixel area in the camera is going to explode and blow up,” he said. “This device reminds me of a lot of science and technology that we had to tackle, but also, there’s a lot of pain that went into this thing.”
