I got me a lawnmower that runs on drill batteries, and I’ve also got one of those portable power stations with a couple solar panels. So I just mowed my lawn with garden fresh artisanal electricity harvested myself.
I got me a lawnmower that runs on drill batteries, and I’ve also got one of those portable power stations with a couple solar panels. So I just mowed my lawn with garden fresh artisanal electricity harvested myself.
Now you just need to automate it. Not with AI, never would trust that, but mapping out like some robot vacuums do to know where they’ve been. Or maybe sensors to detect where the edge is by grass height, much like us humans would mow.
The issue is having an almost perfect yard to do this in. Flat, no major obstacles, no debris. It’s why I never automated my vacuum with pets in the house… if you know, you know.
It’s completely possible to automate grass cutting over nearly every terrain. It’s called grazing. A few sheep or goats are happy to do all the work. And they don’t AI or even need to be programmed or need an internet connection.
I have a kind of strange property. Me and my parents live next door to each other (this corner of this city block has been in my family for nearly a century) and we’ve got a bunch of relatively small areas of grass. It would be nice to automate at least some of it, but robotic mowers either require burying a wire around the perimeter of the area they’re allowed in and have very dumb algorithms that make them somewhat inefficient, or they’re smarter but require satellite uplinks and proprietary services.
So I do still do it by hand.
There are open projects on YouTube. It’s not trivial. Just getting high quality rtk working is a lot of time and money.