The Blue River Technology designed a robot that uses a heady combination of digital wayfinding (that technology shopping electronic panels that you indicate one direction), integrated cameras and computer vision to spray weeds with herbicide without disturbing near - real time on plantations, helping farmers to save expensive herbicides that are potentially harmful to the environment.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., Company caught the attention of heavy equipment maker John Deere in 2017, when it was acquired for $ 305 million, with the goal of integrating the technology into its agricultural equipment.

Blue River researchers experimented with several deep learning structures while trying to train computer vision models to recognize the difference between weeds and crops, a big challenge when you're dealing with cotton plants, which bear a regrettable resemblance to weeds.

Highly trained agronomists were assigned to perform manual image labeling tasks and train a convolutional neural network (CNN) using PyTorch "to analyze each frame and produce an accurate pixel map of where the crops and weeds are," said Chris Padwick, director of computer vision and machine learning at Blue River Technology, in post .

"Like other companies, we tested Caffe , TensorFlow and then PyTorch," Padwick told InfoWorld . “For us, it works practically alone. We didn't have any bug reports or a blocking bug. In distributed computing, it really shines and is easier to use than TensorFlow, which was too complicated for data parallelisms. ”

Padwick says the popularity and simplicity of the PyTorch framework gives the framework an advantage when it comes to getting new hires quickly. That said, Padwick dreams of a world where “people develop into what they feel comfortable with. Some like Apache MXNet or Darknet or Caffe for research, but development has to be in a single language and PyTorch has everything we need to be successful. ”

Information Technology Technicians assist employees of organizations by helping them install and configure system software and hardware. They offer system and operations support to the personnel on a daily basis.