Garden Weeding Robot: From the Hoe to ABB Lessons

Weeds grow faster than tomatoes in every vegetable bed I have seen, and most gardeners still pull them on their knees. A garden weeding robot is meant to take over that chore. It patrols the bed, finds the seedlings that do not belong and knocks them down before they set seed. This post follows the job from the hand hoe and wartime vegetable plots to the first home robots, FarmBot and Tertill, then looks at what changed in 2026 and at the parts of ABB's robot experience that could carry over to a backyard, since ABB itself makes no weeder.

A man pulls a handful of weeds from a green field by hand. Photo: Zaheed Sarwer Khan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

From the hoe and the war garden to the first garden robots

For most of history, weeding meant a blade on a stick or bare hands. The English farmer Jethro Tull argued in his 1731 book on horse-hoeing husbandry that crops sown in straight rows could be hoed between the rows, and vegetable beds are still laid out in rows you can work between. In the home garden the work stayed manual. A gardener with a hoe slices weeds just under the soil surface, and anything growing close to a crop stem has to be pulled by hand, one plant at a time.

A farmer weeds a dry field by hand in Afghanistan, 1976. Photo: Ian Alexander / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Twice in the twentieth century, home gardens became a national effort. During the First World War, Americans were urged to plant war gardens, and army camps such as Camp Dix in New Jersey hoed their own vegetable plots. In the Second World War, victory gardens spread across North America and Britain, and factory workers were photographed hoeing rows after their shifts. Farms moved to tractor cultivators, while the backyard kept the hoe. On commercial fields the short-handled hoe stayed in use until California banned it in 1975 because of the back injuries it caused.

Soldiers weed and hoe a war garden at Camp Dix, New Jersey, during the First World War, one pushing a wheel hoe. Photo: US National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first robots built for home beds came from small startups. Rory Aronson started FarmBot in 2011 as a student at Cal Poly, and its Genesis kit opened for preorders in July 2016. It is a gantry robot on rails over a raised bed that plants seeds, waters, and pushes weeds into the soil with a tool head. Joe Jones, a co-inventor of the Roomba, then founded Franklin Robotics and crowdfunded Tertill in 2017. Tertill went on sale in 2019 at $350: a solar-powered rover that uses capacitive sensors to tell short weeds from taller crops and cuts the weeds with a small string trimmer.

A FarmBot Genesis gantry robot over a raised vegetable bed, with its solar panels behind, 2016. Photo: FarmBot / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Where garden weeding robots stand in 2026

Weeding has become a test case for how far robots can reach into physical work. On 17 October 2026, Business Insider's Alistair Barr wrote that Anthropic's updated research on AI and jobs now considers AI models paired with robots, which raises the estimated exposure of jobs like gardening. Barr doubted it. Anyone who has weeded a bed knows how hard it is to tell a seedling from a weed, crouch at an awkward angle and pull the roots without damaging the plant next door, and a real garden is a lot messier than a research chart.

Volunteers weed rows of onions by hand at Moshav Yated, Israel, March 2024. Photo: Lizzie Shanan / PikiWiki Israel via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

Most of the hardware progress is still happening on farms. In October 2026 Aigen launched a four-arm robot that pulls weeds without herbicide, and Earth Rover showed a machine that kills weeds with pulsed light. Laser weeders, covered in our post on laser weeding farms, keep spreading. Home gardens see the spillover more slowly. FarmBot has turned into a teaching tool as much as a product: in late September 2026 Boston College announced an extra National Science Foundation award of $258,564 for a project in which students build AI-enhanced FarmBots with families.

A FarmBot Genesis set up indoors over a seedling tray, the kind of build used in school projects. Photo: FarmBot / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

ABB does not sell a garden weeding robot, and I know of no ABB weeding project. Its industrial robots do show which parts of the problem are already solved in factories. The GoFa CRB 15000 cobot limits its force and stops when it touches a person, and a garden robot needs the same behaviour around children and pets. The IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection is sealed against water and dust, as any outdoor arm would have to be. As our garden and lawn care post noted, an arm on a mower or rover could borrow those ideas. For now that is only a possibility.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

What comes next for weeding robots in home gardens

Over the next few years I expect the machines to split into two groups. Simple rovers like Tertill will keep cutting weeds by height, which works in a bed of established plants and fails among new seedlings. Camera-based machines will try to tell species apart, as farm robots do, and some will carry a small arm or gripper that pulls weeds out by the root. Training the vision is the slow part. GeekWire reported on 23 October 2026 that Aigen grows AI-generated weeds to train its farm robots, and ABB's AI Robot Trainer for OmniCore EyeMotion, announced the same month, also mixes synthetic and real images to teach factory robots what they see.

Labelling training images in ABB's AI Robot Trainer for OmniCore EyeMotion, with a cobot in the background, 2026. Photo: ABB

Cost is the biggest open problem. A farm robot that clears many hectares can pay for itself in saved labour, but a home gardener compares any robot with an afternoon on their knees and a cheap hoe. Robot lawn mowers show a likely path, since they became common once they were cheap, quiet and easy to set up with a phone app. My guess is that weeding will arrive as a tool added to a mower or a garden rover, because few people will buy a second machine just for weeds.

A Husqvarna Automower robotic mower and the track marks it leaves on a lawn. Photo: W.carter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Safety and programming are the other open problems. A machine with a blade or a gripper working near pets, hands and fruit needs force limits and reliable stopping, the same rules industrial cobots follow. It also has to be easy to set up, since most gardeners will never write code. Factories build and test robot programs first in a simulator such as RobotStudio, and home robots will need their own version of that before anyone leaves an arm alone in a vegetable bed.

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

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