OFF TOPIC Self driving lawn mowers,whats the holdup?

[J Tiers]

Unless that is how you want to spend your hours (I don't), think of it as buying time.

Take away work, sleep, commuting, some domestic chores and how much leisure time to you have left? 2 hours might represent a large percentage increase.

Says the man who, like me, does very time-consuming scraping of machines for alignment, when he could send them off for grinding instead. Or might buy a similar machine in better condition, or even a different machine altogether, in order to get the function, and yet avoid the long hours of what is, frankly, rather tedious scraping.

Different strokes for different folks. I know I am flat crazy, dunno about you.

[JoeLee]

Agreed. I was wondering how one of these would do in my Dad's yard -- problem is, it's less than flat, 3 acres with plenty of trees etc. but anything would be cheaper than the landscape service he currently uses. I've offered to do it myself but he won't hear of it, and he's not going to do it himself at 86 yrs old.

I had an idea that I was working on years ago but was never successful at automating it. I came to the conclusion that some things are best done manually !!

Perhaps with stepper motors and software I may be able to do so now. Hey, may even be able to control it from my smart phone !!

JL.................

[nickel-city-fab]

I had an idea that I was working on years ago but was never successful at automating it. I came to the conclusion that some things are best done manually !!

LOL yep, I agree doing the lawn is best done manually. Great illustration. As a teen, 40 yrs ago, I had the responsibility of a 12-acre yard that also needed raked every time... guess what, it got done. Slowly, but it got done. Kept me out of trouble and in pocket money too.

[SteveF]

We really need automatic mowers now? Why not just put down artificial turf? .................

Because horses don't eat plastic..

Have lots of time to think about this when mowing pastures. My idea would be you put up IR emitters, radio wave or something similar with coded output so they are unique. Three or more depending upon size of the area and line of sight issues. Then your mower has a receiver that measures the angle to each one so it knows its exact position to a level of precision far higher than a GPS signal. Now, you park the mower in a spot. Press "Record" and start mowing, all the while the system is calculating its exact position as you mow. The next time you drive the mower to the same spot, press "Play", get off the mower and off it goes following the same path as the last time.

On my To Do list for right after I win the lottery. Yes, if I win the lottery I can just hire someone but this would be an interesting project.

Just for fun everything would be in an enclosure on the seat that looks like R2D2.

Steve

[macona]

With differential or rtk GPS you can get down to less than 1" of location accuracy. This relies on a fixed base station that communicates with the gps in the vehicle. The price for this has come down significantly in the past few years, it used to be the domain of $4k gps modules.

[SteveF]

One inch is plenty accurate enough.

Let me start working on the R2D2 body.

[Bob Engelhardt]

https://www.grazemowing.com/

[CountZero]

Plenty of bigger automatic mowers around here for soccer fields and such https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io9HqpN_hUQ