OpenMower – An open source lawn mower

It does not have obstacle avoidance, the best it has is recognizing it keeps getting stuck and skipping the next goal until it finds a goal it can reach. This can often look like obstacle avoidance since the next goal might be in a slightly different direction and so it will be able to continue. This is aided by a new feature that I added which will make the mower back up first when it gets stuck before continuing.

However, I should note that it's a hackable ROS system, so people have added obstacle detection with various sensors on their mowers. There is just not official support or a standard way to do it.

I've mowed with it this summer and last summer, and there hasn't been downtime at much as repeatedly getting stuck and requiring me to bring it back to the dock (although less and less). But my lawn is probably the hardest lawn any Openmower mows, as I mentioned in a cousin comment.

"Let's be honest: The current generation of robotic lawn mowers sucks. Basically all of these bots drive in a random direction until they hit the border of the lawn, rotate for a randomized duration and repeat. I think we can do better!"

The funny thing is: this actually works incredibly well. Perimeter wires are a PITA to install, but once that's done, they are a very practical and flawless method for making sure the robot does not escape into the neighbour's yard or worse. The random movement is really effective too. What exactly can a smart robot do better?

Removing the need for perimeter wires would be great, as long as it works 100% flawlessly. Obstacle detection would also be nice, so I can avoid my mower chewing up the toys my kid sometimes leaves lying around (though it is a great motivation to clean up!)

> And I never saw anyone using them at night - for a reason.

...how late you were checking?

I can see reason to set them on say 5AM so it finishes before you wake up

No amount of things like grass mowers can add up to it.

You have to look at stuff people buy in large volume, like food, housing, energy, education, and health-care.

(By the way, I don't know if your figures are correct. I don't even know what country you are at.)

> The current generation of robotic lawn mowers sucks. Basically all of these bots drive in a random direction until they hit the border of the lawn, rotate for a randomized duration and repeat.

I recently (a few weeks ago) bought one. While researching on the available options (which seemed relevant to me), actually almost none of the robots work this way. Most of them systematically go through the lawn. I think from those that I checked, only the Worx Landroid does it randomly.

I was searching for some model which works without wires, because I was too lazy to set this up. Basically, in general, I wanted sth which required as little effort as possible.

I decided for eufy E15, which uses camera (no GPS, no wires, no lidar, nothing else really). And it just seems to work. It creates a map first, and then systematically goes over the lawn. I didn't really need to do anything.

(I'm not affiliated with eufy in any way. I'm just quite happy with it so far.)

That said, obviously, having an open source variant of such a robot would be even nicer (if it works)! So I'm quite happy to see such a project.

This robot here uses GPS, as far as I can see, as the sole technique for navigation and localization. From reports that I have read, GPS mostly works fine, except for some cases where it does not (where GPS coverage is not great). Camera on the other side always works (during daytime). Maybe this could be added to this project? Of course, using the camera is probably quite a bit more complicated, and more prone to errors, but overall might be more robust and reliable.