RoboMow Rocks!

A couple of months ago, my wife brought in a Sam's Club catalog and said to me, "There's something in here I thought you'd like," and smiled. I'm thinking, "Uh-oh, this is gonna cost us," knowing full well I'll probably love whatever she's going to show me.

So she opens the catalog and points to a little picture of an odd-looking lawn mower. Upon closer inspection, it appears that this lawn mower doesn't have a handle, and furthermore, it is sitting on what looks like a little docking station. I say, "No way!" and start to read more. It was, in fact, a picture of the Friendly Robotics RoboMow, an ingenious invention for mowing your lawn for you, and for about half the cost of a good riding lawn mower, which we were considering purchasing anyway. Not that our lawn really warranted one, of course.

The next week, RoboMow showed up at our house, and then the real work began. The way the system works is similar to an electric fence for dogs, with a perimeter wire to indicate its boundaries. Our lawn is a little larger than the 500ft of perimeter wire would allow, but we had anticipated this, having read a few reviews with pitfalls to avoid, so we had already purchased more wire and pegs to hold down the wire. It took us approximately 8 hours over the course of 2 days (we still needed more pegs, which a trip to Home Depot solved) to string the perimeter wire around the house and the lawn, in rain and sun (it poored and drizzled for a couple of those hours each day). But a few hours up front is still going to save us days over the course of having this little contraption.

After letting RoboMow charge for 24 hours, we went out to let it calibrate itself with the earth's magnetic poles for mowing in our yard. I'm guessing that it basically just has a compass that it uses to verify which direction it has gone and which direction it's going, to determine if it has covered all of your lawn. It uses a criss-cross pattern when mowing, hitting the grass at different angles so that after a few passes, it hasn't missed any spots. Then, once it thinks it is done, or the battery is too low, it follows the perimeterto the docking station to recharge.

We've run into a few problems with the system so far, and some can be avoided, while others are just based on the lay of the land. The book says to make sure that the lawn doesn't have any hills that are more than a 15% gradient. It can have trouble with those. We have a couple of steep spots, but nothing that RoboMow hasn't been able to handle yet. However, we have a water meter in the front that sticks up just a little bit, especially in dry weather, and a natural drainage channel in the back that stays a little wet, and RoboMow has gotten stuck in those areas a few times. We also have a swing-set area in the back yard with blocks around it that aren't 6 inches taller than the ground -- a requirement for the bumpers -- so sometimes it runs up on those, depending on the angle it comes in at. And finally, the dock really has to be level, or RoboMow will roll right out. That has been our biggest problem so far.

Overall, though, RoboMow does a great job on the lawn, and the coolness factor is definitely high. I think back to my days in Robotics class and remember how difficult it was to get our Lego robot to follow a line, much less give it blades and enough autonomy to mow the lawn! It's also good to see somebody reaping the rewards of robotic research. Hopefully it will give them some spending money to work on even better robotic tools.