The development of improved cultivation technology for row crop production has been an active area of research, and has made significant progress in recent years. Currently, standard cultivation removes weeds from the majority of the bed using sweeps, knives, coulters and blades. Typically a 4-inch wide band is left around the seedline. Weeds in the uncultivated band are typically removed by hand, and the density of weeds that occur there, determines how laborious and costly subsequent hand weeding will be.

There is technology to remove weeds from the seedline and it generally falls into two categories: 1) blind cultivation and 2) computer assisted cultivators. Implements used for blind cultivation are not guided by a...