Carbon Robotics Brand Guidelines: Seattle’s LaserWeeder and a Deere Autonomy Kit

Weeds as a vision problem.

Carbon Robotics is a Seattle company that builds machines to kill weeds with lasers. It was founded in 2018 by Paul Mikesell, who remains its chief executive. The company’s own history page lists his earlier work: he founded Isilon Systems, co-founded Clustrix, and worked at Uber and at Oculus Research before turning to agriculture. He studied computer science at the University of Washington.

AgFunderNews reported in April 2021, when the company unveiled its third-generation weeding robot, that Mikesell had met farmers to ask about their costs and biggest struggles with automation, and that weed control kept coming up. “So, we built an autonomous robot that drives itself and uses computer vision to kill weeds with a really high-powered laser,” he told the publication. He compared the approach to the image recognition that tags faces in photographs or finds lanes for self-driving cars, repurposed for weeds. The same report said that since 2018 the company had run beta tests on specialty-crop farms, including broccoli and onion growers, and was selling directly to farmers, mostly on the US West Coast.

The company’s own timeline traces the hardware back further. It begins with a Laser Cart in August 2019 — a single laser on a frame pushed by hand — followed by prototypes it called Seedy, Veggie and Bud, each with more lasers and wider coverage. Bud, of March 2021, carried eight lasers, which matches the robot AgFunderNews described that spring. The commercial LaserWeeder followed in May 2022, and the company says it was the world’s first commercial laser weeder.

In October 2026 AgFunderNews reported that Carbon Robotics had made an undisclosed number of layoffs; its marketing vice-president said the company had needed to “realign costs due to broader economic conditions” and that it had 275 employees worldwide. Two months earlier Mikesell had told the same publication that the company was developing a machine it had not yet announced and ultimately aimed to become a publicly traded company.

From a self-driving robot to an implement.

The product changed shape as it grew. The 2021 machine was a self-driving robot about the size of a medium tractor, powered by a diesel hydraulic system, according to AgFunderNews. The LaserWeeder of 2022 is different: a tractor-pulled implement rather than a self-propelled robot. The company says the first version, codenamed Slayer, carried thirty carbon-dioxide lasers across a three-bed span and went to work in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona and New Mexico.

In March 2025 the company introduced the LaserWeeder G2, codenamed Reaper. It switched to diode lasers grouped in modules, and the company offers it in widths from two to twelve metres; the G2-600 has twelve modules and twenty-four lasers. The company also markets the machine for laser thinning, the job of removing surplus crop seedlings so the rest have room to grow.

The second product line is Carbon Autonomy, launched in March 2025. It is a kit that turns existing John Deere 6R, 8R, 8RX and 8RT tractors from 2019 onwards into autonomous machines, with no permanent modifications, the company says. It combines cameras, lidar, radar and RTK GPS, and Carbon staff supervise the tractors remotely over a satellite link, able to take control when needed. The company lists tilling, discing, ripping and mowing among its tasks, as well as pulling a LaserWeeder, and says it is initially available in specific US regions. A third name, Carbon AI, sits beside them in its website’s product list.

Carbon Robotics says it has its own manufacturing facilities in the United States and Europe and growers in fifteen countries; Mikesell told AgFunderNews in August 2026 that its machines were available in about twenty, with most traction in the United States, then Western Europe and Australia. Both figures are the company’s own. It has also offered leasing since 2021, and Mikesell said in 2026 that some banks now write operating leases for LaserWeeders.

Category.

Precision-farming and agricultural-robot companies sell technology that most people never see up close, so their imagery has to do a lot of explaining. The most familiar picture is a machine working a long crop row, shot low and often in the warm light of early morning or evening, with the rows running away toward the horizon. It speaks of scale and repetition: the field is large, and the machine passes over every metre of it.

The second recurring picture is the screen. Guidance and control makers show in-cab displays filled with colour field maps — bands of colour for harvest, seeding or coverage — with a small tractor or sprayer icon tracing its path. Drone-eye views of fields do similar work from outside the cab, turning a farm into a grid, a patchwork or a set of passes that reads almost like a diagram.

People appear too, usually as working figures rather than models: a farmer at the edge of a field holding a tablet, an engineer kneeling beside a robot between the plants, a dealer pointing at a display. Robot makers lean on close-ups of cameras, solar panels and wheels, and on small machines set against wide open ground.

Much of this imagery is made for the trade-show calendar. Launches cluster around large events such as Agritechnica in Hanover, World FIRA, the agricultural-robotics meeting in France, and the Farm Progress Show in the American Midwest, where companies build branded stands, demonstration plots and live field runs. For a designer the visual language is consistent: greens and earth tones taken from the field, high-contrast interface colour taken from the screens, and clean sans-serif type that looks at home on a display.

Codenames and generations.

Carbon Robotics presents itself as an engineering company first. Its website calls it a leader in “physical AI” for agriculture, which it describes as AI that works in the real world, and it tells its history as a sequence of hardware generations, each with a date, a laser count and a place where it was first deployed. The internal codenames — Slayer for the first LaserWeeder, Reaper for the second — sit beside the commercial product names on its own timeline.

The product names are built in a consistent way. LaserWeeder is written as one word with two capitals and carries a trademark sign on the company’s site; the second generation adds a plain G2, and sizes follow as numbers such as G2-600. The autonomy kit and the software both take the company’s first word, Carbon, as a prefix. Its company page features an interview with Mikesell about building the business.

The company’s website is carbonrobotics.com, where it also publishes grower stories and trial results alongside its product pages.

For a design guide, Carbon Robotics shows how a farm-machinery brand can borrow the habits of a software company: versioned products, codenames and a founder-led story. Compare John Deere, whose tractors its autonomy kit is built to fit, and FarmWise, another American maker of weeding machines. For this guide we use a graphite and an ember orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Carbon Robotics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.