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Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor

offthegrid.dev

11–20 of 109 posts

Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor

#11

We had the same problem of grass growing heedlessly but solved it in a different way. We got a bio-fuelled autonomous self-propelled lawn management solution which intelligently solves the problem without the need for any programming, all it needs is for us to demarcate the area in need of maintenance with some special white band. Even though it is more than 30 years old it does the job just fine. It doesn't just cut…

> a small-ish Welsh mountain pony

I thought it was a goat at first.

Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor

#12

That is awesome. I have wanted to do this for an electric mower. And maybe eventually train it to drive itself with ML. You could even start a service to cut yards and use the public records of the lots to set a boundaries for the yard.

There's an Ardumower project, I'm intending to work on building one over the winter.

I dream of far more sophisticated home garden robots, but would settle for farming out the basic haircut to a robot.

Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor

#13

That is awesome. I have wanted to do this for an electric mower. And maybe eventually train it to drive itself with ML. You could even start a service to cut yards and use the public records of the lots to set a boundaries for the yard.

I would definitely buy a Roomba for my lawn (assuming it worked well). Obviously more safety concerns than a vacuum cleaner, with the spinning metal blades and all, but seems doable.

Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor

#14

There are a couple of remote lawnmowers on the market. I'm surprised given what we can do with AI that they are not in wider use. I think I might have kept my house with a small yard if I could have just turned on the iMow and let it go.

They seem really limited at this point. It seems to be out that outdoors is surprisingly inconsistent / has a lot more exceptions than indoors. And even those that use small blades still have a fairly high bar safety wise to overcome.

An early model years ago was able to tip over and keep running before it was recalled ... not the kind of thing you want sitting out on your lawn or the sidewalk.

Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor

#16

There are a couple of remote lawnmowers on the market. I'm surprised given what we can do with AI that they are not in wider use. I think I might have kept my house with a small yard if I could have just turned on the iMow and let it go.

https://www.homedepot.com/b/Outdoors-Outdoor-Power-Equipment...

Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor

#17

That is awesome. I have wanted to do this for an electric mower. And maybe eventually train it to drive itself with ML. You could even start a service to cut yards and use the public records of the lots to set a boundaries for the yard.

I would definitely buy a Roomba for my lawn (assuming it worked well). Obviously more safety concerns than a vacuum cleaner, with the spinning metal blades and all, but seems doable.

Existing lawn robots still mostly rely on a buried cable to form a boundary-line. The next generation vision/lidar/gps systems are clearly in development but not commercially available in the US (the Segway NaviMow is available in Europe).

Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor

#18

That is awesome. I have wanted to do this for an electric mower. And maybe eventually train it to drive itself with ML. You could even start a service to cut yards and use the public records of the lots to set a boundaries for the yard.

Have you seen OpenMower?

https://github.com/ClemensElflein/OpenMower

Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor

#19
Looks great. An enhancement to the kill switch might be to make it a normally open relay which needs to keep receiving a command to keep it closed. So that when power or communication fails it stops instead of requiring power to activate the kill switch.
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