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.
Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
21–30 of 109 posts
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#22to me, this is the future of technology I am interested in. Primarily, small scale technology that can be meshed up together to create awesome results.
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#23I wanted to do the same with but with a large agricultural tractor.
I think we are nearing the point where a camera can monitor my body movements and mimic it fairly accurately in a robot. Combine that with gloves for hand tracking, VR goggles, audio headsets and maybe haptic feedback and we can effectively have remote experiences.
Once that’s the case, you put a robot in a tractor seat; add a bunch of cameras (for VR), microphones (for audio), and a couple robot arms with humanoid hands attached (https://www.psyonic.io/ability-hand).
I can then remotely control the tractor in VR space, but have it operate 100 miles away
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#24Overview of converting an old lawn tractor to a remotely controlled and immersive drone-like experience. The tractor gets equipped with video cameras, sensors, microcontrollers, wifi, and experimental augmented reality feature. A web interface with a head-up display and a gamepad allows for the control of the tractor from any device.
With this kind of setup we can finalize outsource our lawn mowing to India ;)
You're laughing but this will probably happen, together with large scale automation. Labor costs are still a significant portion of costs [0, see "Labor Cost Share of Total Gross Revenues"].
[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#25I wonder if OP considered any alternatives to a manicured monocultured lawn?
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#26That's some great work and a really good write-up.
I could see practical uses well beyond a lawn mower. This would be very handy in really hot or cold weather with just about any large tractor that is not enclosed and does not have air conditioning or heating. No more breathing exhaust and no more being exposed to the weather. For large farm equipment one would still need a person near by in the event things get tangled up in the equipment such as barbed wire snagged up into discs but that is an acceptable trade-off to me.
As a bonus, no more being locked into newer tractors. If I could put this remote control on my 1947 Fordson tractor it would now be put to work with automation and for fun the neighbors would think it's a ghost tractor. Probably the tricky part is dealing with the stiff clutch and finicky gear shifting. I imagine it would get some looks from the tourists passing by on the highway.
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Husqvarna EPOS does not need physical boundary wires and seems to be available in the US too:
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#28We 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.
The control logic on those is flawed which makes them incapable of distinguishing between the lawn and the laundry.
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#29I wanted to do the same with but with a large agricultural tractor. I think we are nearing the point where a camera can monitor my body movements and mimic it fairly accurately in a robot. Combine that with gloves for hand tracking, VR goggles, audio headsets and maybe haptic feedback and we can effectively have remote experiences. Once that’s the case, you put a robot in a tractor seat; add a bunch of cameras (for V…
I understand why you would do it, but using robot arms to control another robot seems like a lot of accidental complexity. Surely there has to be a generation of tractor that's new enough that most functions are exposed on CANbus but old enough that it isn't locked down yet?
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#30There 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.
> I'm surprised given what we can do with AI that they are not in wider use. If your yard has any relatively steep parts, they fail. I was 100% ready to buy one, only to discover I would still be mowing 30-40% of my yard by hand. I suspect there's a reason most of the demos are on completely flat yards.
Let me introduce you to RC slope mowers: http://www.rcmowersusa.com/