The autonomous robot initiates its operation by traversing the field at a controlled speed of 5 cm/s along a straight path. This designated speed facilitates comprehensive terrain scanning and allows sufficient time for real-time weed detection. To optimize computational resources, the robotic arm is activated for precise weed targeting and removal only after a weed is detected. Upon positive identification of a weed within the camera’s field of view, the robot attempts to realign itself by referencing the history of wheel encoder values before pausing its locomotion. This ensures that the robot moves back to the encoder value recorded at the time the image was captured before stopping. The integrated linear actuator then positions the laser arm, aligning it with the centroid of the detected weed’s bounding box (Figure 3b).