Love these types of advances though I wonder if weeds and pests will adapt to outwit the robot or if our ability to adapt automation to such changes simply will always/usually be too rapid for nature to keep up.
Pests will adapt to physical pest control like fire or crop rotation by timing their life cycles to avoid it. Robots aren't any different in that regard, if used without care pests could hypothetically adapt to their usage.
The key to preventing this kind of adaptation is multiple modes of action. Robots do offer that ability because they can be used to both physically remove pests, and also chemically treat pests like in the video.
If you have two to three robust modes of action, you can basically prevent resistance from happening entirely.
There is a plant that mimics the shapes of other leaves - even if the leaves are made out of plastic. Pretty fascinating, the same photoreceptors suspected to enable this have been found in other plants, but the others don't use it to engage in mimicry.
Weeds adapting to look like non-weeds is highly plausible, IMO.
Boquila trifoliolata can do it within a single generation. Most weeds don't have this capability currently, but a strong selective pressure could make it happen pretty quick with the right lucky mutations.
>It is possible that rye traveled west from Asia Minor as a minor admixture in wheat (possibly as a result of Vavilovian mimicry), and was only later cultivated in its own right.[0]
Also found this about rye while looking that up:
>Recently, scholars have discovered that rye, more than other domesticated crops has followed a weedy species type of domestication process--from wild to weed to crop and then back to weed again.[1]
I learned this from my brother when I was harvesting Job's Tears in the garden. A bunch of foxtail seeds kept landing in the bowl, and looked just about big enough to be a grain - I commented that it seemed likely that some of our grains must have evolved that way, getting selected because they got harder to distinguish from the main plant. He was like "yeah... that's basically the story of Rye" lol. It was something I'd never thought about, but actually trying to harvest a grain made it really clear.
