Cool!
Now if only it could hitch and unhitch implements, load and unload a wagon, back up and see behind. Then it could be useful!
Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
31–40 of 109 posts
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#32Looks 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.
+1
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#33I love the idea of this because I hate lawn maintenance. But the idea of letting software I wrote run around with whirling blades of death underneath of it would keep me from doing it.
A solution could be to just secure the area well enough to guarantee that 1) an uncontrolled machine can't escape and 2) people don't enter the area. Then you don't particularly care if the machine is "unsafe" if there's no way it can harm anyone.
That's the approach most industrial robots take - instead of trying to deal with humans and not hurt them, just make sure there are no humans within reach of the robots.
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#34I 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?
The lockdowns are only for the user-facing diagnostic port. I'm not aware of any vehicle that uses encryption & authentication on the inner buses. Your only challenge is to reverse-engineer the meaning of the messages.
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#35I love the idea of this because I hate lawn maintenance. But the idea of letting software I wrote run around with whirling blades of death underneath of it would keep me from doing it.
A solution could be to just secure the area well enough to guarantee that 1) an uncontrolled machine can't escape and 2) people don't enter the area. Then you don't particularly care if the machine is "unsafe" if there's no way it can harm anyone. That's the approach most industrial robots take - instead of trying to deal with humans and not hurt them, just make sure there are no humans within reach of the robots.
> 2) people don't enter the area
That's harder than it should be. No amount of asking my neighbors has kept their kids out of my fenced lawn to retrieve their soccer balls. Which is actually an issue because one of my dogs is not particularly friendly. I'd gladly kick the ball back over if they just knocked on the door. We're not a neighbor-hate-neighbor situation, we actually get along quite well, but kids will be kids.
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#36I don’t know if it helps but the super cheap flysky rc system (common budget option on rc aircraft) has failsafe functionality built in. You configure which outputs should be in which state during failsafe and it can be triggered by being out of rc range (i.e. experiencing unexpected interferance) or by toggling a switch to select failsafe deliberately.
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
A solution could be to just secure the area well enough to guarantee that 1) an uncontrolled machine can't escape and 2) people don't enter the area. Then you don't particularly care if the machine is "unsafe" if there's no way it can harm anyone. That's the approach most industrial robots take - instead of trying to deal with humans and not hurt them, just make sure there are no humans within reach of the robots.
> 2) people don't enter the area That's harder than it should be. No amount of asking my neighbors has kept their kids out of my fenced lawn to retrieve their soccer balls. Which is actually an issue because one of my dogs is not particularly friendly. I'd gladly kick the ball back over if they just knocked on the door. We're not a neighbor-hate-neighbor situation, we actually get along quite well, but kids will be k…
Asking isn't enough, but proper fences should both make it impossible to get in without significant effort and also do a good job at containing the machine should it try to run away.
It's up to you to run the numbers whether the cost of securing the area is less than what you spend (in terms of time/inconvenience/etc) manually mowing the lawn.
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#38There 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.
That is true, it is frustrating that times have changed to the point where innovation in this scale is hampered under the guise of safety.
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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/
How much does something like that cost?
Re: Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
#40I love the idea of this because I hate lawn maintenance. But the idea of letting software I wrote run around with whirling blades of death underneath of it would keep me from doing it.
A solution could be to just secure the area well enough to guarantee that 1) an uncontrolled machine can't escape and 2) people don't enter the area. Then you don't particularly care if the machine is "unsafe" if there's no way it can harm anyone. That's the approach most industrial robots take - instead of trying to deal with humans and not hurt them, just make sure there are no humans within reach of the robots.
That works great in industry, indoors. Outside you are going to have animals. I have a few acres that I mow and find new nesting animals pretty much weekly. Some of them can fly, and the migratory ones (which I do not personally know how to spot aside from a few recurring visitors) are legally protected. Sometimes they run away as they approach, sometimes they want to defend. Either way I do my best to go around and leave them their patch.