Your Very Own Robot To Mow The Lawn
It sounds futuristic doesn’t it? But that future is here today. In fact, Amazon held their annual Prime Day a couple of days ago on the 12th July, and the first item to sell our on their ‘all day’ spotlight deals was exactly what we’re talking about today, so they’re going to be appearing all over the country very soon indeed. We actually had no idea that they were anywhere near advanced enough to roll out on this scale, but we’re clearly wrong.
A quick look at that model that sold out so quickly has shown that there’s entire websites dedicated to these devices, the intriguingly named robotic lawn mowers. Simply searching on Google for a Flymo 1200R brings back this website, which shows around ten models that are already available to be bought by the general public, and looking at what they’ve written about them, it seems that they’re already making good use of existing technology like GPS alongside their own software so that they don’t just head around your garden at random, they even plot their course algorithmically to make the best use of each charging cycle. Incredibly, they’ve been designed to be clever enough to wander back to their charging bases half way through a mow to recharge, and once done, head back out to finish the job off – that’s far better than a human – we’re far more likely to do the first half and intend to come back to finish off but never quite get around to it.
Rival to Flymo, Husqvana have some very impressive machines too – here’s an in depth comparison experiment highlighting some of the hurdles that the technology has been required to overcome along its development cycle:
As highlighted, there’s a lot more to creating a robotic lawn mower than simply creating something that will drive itself up and down a rectangular patch of grass every couple of weeks – there’s obstacles, slopes, boundaries, uneven surfaces and more to contend with. It’s going to be exciting to see how much further this can be taken – probably much farther than we could possibly imagine today!