Mark Siemens, associate specialist and professor at the Department of Biosystems Engineering at the University of Arizona, said the university is part of a multistate effort that aims to create a precision weeding machine.

The research effort began about three-and-a-half years ago, and a large part of the automated weeding research was spent trying to address and solve the problem of being able to differentiate between the crop plants and a weed, Siemens said.

Since the project began, there have been big advancements in artificial intelligence ... that provide computers the ability to recognize different objects within an image.