Woo Soo Kim conceived the concept for the compact autonomous weed management robot and supervised the project. Hadi Moeinnia supported the team in the robot’s design and development, oversaw field experiments, completed YOLOX weed detection tasks, and conducted data analysis. Devin Armstrong was responsible for software development, focusing on weed targeting and laser arm control. Jacob Angelozzi managed the MCU programming for the robot’s autonomous locomotion. Gavin handled the mechanical design and implementation of the chassis and laser arm, in addition to manufacturing components. Kimia Rezaeian led the electrical design and implementation of the robot. Yonghao Wen and Devon Scott worked on the implementation of real-time object detection. Emmanuel Sulle coordinated the field validation of the robot’s performance conducted in Arusha, Tanzania. All authors contributed to drafting the manuscript and preparing figures, tables, and datasets.