The Robots Are Coming (To Mow Your Lawn)

For some people, mowing the lawn is a meditative experience?a chance to tune out while getting a little exercise walking behind the lawnmower, inhaling the scent of freshly cut grass. It's good old-fashioned domestic man's work, like your father did before you, his father before him, and so on. Well, not me. I hate mowing the lawn. It's a numbingly repetitive, sweaty, noisy waste of time. My father hated it too. And I'm pretty sure his dad did before him.

Tell you what I do like, though: robots?love 'em! In fact, I would gleefully surrender every thankless bit of home landscaping to an automaton. So I decided to see if I could piece together a system wherein my lawn essentially would take care of itself. Yes, I could have hired a landscaping crew, but to me that was a dodge. I didn't want to pass off my dirty work to someone else. That's the beauty of robots?one day they may take over the world, but for now, they get the grunt work.

And, it's worth mentioning, I wanted a beautiful lawn?green, lush, carpetlike?something my family and I could really roll around on during a midsummer day. I just didn't want to sweat for it. The good news is that, for mowing, there's already a robot solution?a couple of them, in fact. Honda sells the Miimo; a company called LawnBott offers a variety of, well, lawn bots; and Friendly Robotics has a bunch of really friendly looking mowing robots. All of these systems seem pretty similar and promise essentially the same thing: to tame your turf with a minimum of human oversight.

I called up Husqvarna, a company with a long history in the grasscutting biz. Husqvarna also has deep experience with robotic lawnmowers; it introduced the first consumer model in 1995. Now it sells two: the Automower 230 ACX ($2700) and the Automower 265 ACX ($3700). A few weeks after my call, I got a big box with a 265 ACX and an appointment with company representatives Quinn Derby and Gent Simmons. They arrived a few days later, surveyed my postage-stamp-size lawn, looked at the box from their company, and concluded that the 265 was complete overkill. But the machine was there, so they decided to install it anyway.

Now, two animal analogies are useful for understanding the operation of the Automower. First, the machine works like a sheep, roaming about your lawn at random, nibbling away at the blades of grass in small increments. Second, the Automower is prevented from leaving your lawn in much the same way that a dog can be contained within an electric fence. That's what Derby and Simmons installed on my lawn?a fence for the robot. They laid down a low-voltage wire that creates a mild electromagnetic field so the robot can sense when it has reached the prescribed boundary, then back up, turn randomly, and proceed off in another direction.

Derby informed me that my lawn was an unusual one for the Automower. That's because I really have two lawns: a small one in the front of the house, and a larger one in the back, separated by a fence and a patio. I could tell that Derby is by nature a problem solver, as he described several ways he could attempt to string the wire to allow the robot to travel from my back lawn to the front lawn. But I imagined the poor, confused machine attempting to nudge aside patio furniture along the way, and I told Derby to fence them off separately?occasionally I'd just pick the thing up and move it to the front lawn myself.

The two men installed the perimeter wire and base station and then gave me some brief advice on programming the mower?1 hour, for four days a week, would keep the back lawn neat and tidy; 11/2 hours once a week would handle the front.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/robots/the-robots-are-coming-to-mow-your-lawn-15746274?src=rss

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