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back to article Latest El Reg project: Rise of the Robot Sheep

After seven years of faithful service, my lawn-clipping droid Mowbot has had to be retired... and a replacement is hard to obtain. Rather than face an ever-growing lawn, I've decided it's time to unlock the inventing shed and seek some reader advice. Robots were supposed to be doing pretty much all our manual labour by this …

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  1. Robert Heffernan
    Terminator

    My Idea

    Here's my idea.

    A tracked platform containing a reel type mowing assembly powered electrically. Such a setup would be rather quiet. For the navigation, a small linux based single-board computer connected to a Kinect as the sensor.

    Now using the Kinect in an outdoor setting requires use of the equipment at night to avoid the infra-red of the sun intefeering with the IR emitted by the Kinect. Thankfully the tracks and mower are relatively quiet.

    The only real hard part would be the software, using the Kinect data for collision avoidance and navigation.

    You would put the mower in the dock to charge, when the sun goes down, the mower comes out, does it's thing and parks back in it's dock to charge ready for the next outing.

    *Terminator for when it gets hit by lightning and decides fido needs a haircut

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    1. John 62
      Reply Icon

      dew?

      surely at night there's too much dew to mow.

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      1. Robert Heffernan
        Reply Icon

        Not necessarially

        All it needs is for the sun to go down (removing the massive thermonuclear IR emitter), so it can start it's business before the dew settles in, which in my experience is in the early hours of the morning.

        Obviously you could also equip it with sensors to detect such moisture, indeed a sensor would be advantageous to detect rain so it can get back to it's nice and dry dock before it really gets soaked.

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  2. John 62

    one man went to mow, went to mow a meadow, one man and his dog went to mow a meadow...

    GPS. I just read about an aussie seed drill set-up that has a 64m drill towed by two 425hp John Deere 9400Ts ("in series"). Obviously the tractors have their own GPS navigation, but so does the seed drill, which operates in a no-till system whereby the seeds are deposited in the groove _between_ the drills from the previous season. Yes, this 64m-wide seed drill must automatically steer itself so it can drill a tiny target area consistently for miles at a time. Modern agriculture is pretty awesome.

    Anyway, that means that if the aussies can use use GPS for guiding a seed drill within an inch, then you should be able to get lovely stripes in any pattern you fancy on your little lawn.

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  3. Will Wykeham

    Computer Vision

    Clearly the best solution for navigation would be the some of the normal motion analysis/structure from motion computer vision techniques, for automated guidance.

    Simply mount a standard vga webcam, streaming to a box in the house with a big processor. Build some software based on Open CV that is capable of identifying grass texture and distinguishing it from, say, flowerbed. It would then be track garden landmarks, flowerbeds, fences etc. to work out where it was on the lawn.

    On the first haphazard pass it would build up a picture of the lawn until it had the whole lot, and after that it could calculate the most optimal route.

    The software would be quite involved, but it would keep the part cost for the machine down as all, particularly if you are using an existing computer for processing resource. Processing could be put in the mower, keeping it as a fully independent, autonomous sheep/goat.

    Non-obvious boundaries could be input on an interactive map, or indicated using some form of easily computer recognisable marker, e.g. QR code as someone suggested.

    What I'm envisaging is a single hardware platform (designed using some of the excellent ideas above, and presumably below) on which a multitude of people are developing open source cleverness to turn it into a mower.

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