John Stenger

Ranjan Sapkota, John Stenger, Michael Ostlie et al.

Currently, weed control in commercial corn production is performed without considering weed distribution information in the field. This kind of weed management practice leads to excessive amounts of chemical herbicides being applied in a given field. The objective of this study was to perform site-specific weed control (SSWC) in a corn field by 1) using an unmanned aerial system (UAS) to map the spatial distribution information of weeds in the field; 2) creating a prescription map based on the weed distribution map, and 3) spraying the field using the prescription map and a commercial size sprayer. In this study, we are proposing a Crop Row Identification (CRI) algorithm, a computer vision algorithm that identifies corn rows on UAS imagery. After being identified, the corn rows were then removed from the imagery and the remaining vegetation fraction was classified as weeds. Based on that information, a grid-based weed prescription map was created and the weed control application was implemented through a commercial-size sprayer. The decision of spraying herbicides on a particular grid was based on the presence of weeds in that grid cell. All the grids that contained at least one weed were sprayed, while the grids free of weeds were not. Using our SSWC approach, we were able to save 26.23\% of the land (1.97 acres) from being sprayed with chemical herbicides compared to the existing method. This study presents a full workflow from UAS image collection to field weed control implementation using a commercial-size sprayer, and it shows that some level of savings can potentially be obtained even in a situation with high weed infestation, which might provide an opportunity to reduce chemical usage in corn production systems.

Dominik Soós, Marc Paterno, John Stenger et al.

Optimization problems become fundamentally challenging as the number of variables increases. Because the volume of the search space grows exponentially, classical algorithms frequently fail to locate the global minimum of non-convex functions. While quantum optimization offers a potential alternative, mapping continuous problems onto near-term quantum hardware introduces severe scaling limits and barren plateaus. To bridge this gap, we propose the Distributed Quantum-Enhanced Optimization (D-QEO) framework. Instead of forcing the quantum processor to find the exact minimum, we use it simply as a topographical preconditioner. The QPU maps the landscape to locate the most promising basin of attraction, generating high-quality seed points for a classical GPU-accelerated solver to refine. To make this approach viable for utility-scale problems, we exploit the mathematical structure of separable functions. This allows us to cut a 50-qubit (i.e., $2^{50}$) global search space into independent and manageable sub-spaces using 5-qubit subcircuits. By executing these fragments concurrently with CUDA-Q, we completely bypass the overhead of cross-register entanglement and classical tensor knitting for separable functions. Benchmarks on the 10-dimensional Rastrigin and Ackley functions show that D-QEO prevents the exponential failure rates observed in purely classical algorithms. Furthermore, this quantum warm-start significantly reduces the number of classical BFGS iterations required to converge, providing a highly practical blueprint for utilizing near-term quantum resources in complex global search.