Robots Roll from the Living Room to the Front Yard
When it comes to robot lawnmowers, the United States is behind several other countries including Germany, Sweden, and England. That could be because Americans tend to have much larger yards, or because there’s something relaxing about riding a John Deere tractor, especially during the spring and fall.
But 2018 is shaping up to be the year of the robot mower in the U.S., thanks in part to the Husqvarna Group’s Automower line, according to a recent story by John Gaudiosi in DigitalTrends.com.
While the Automower may look like the familiar Roomba that sweeps your floors at home, it actually precedes the Roomba by several years. The first Automower was chewing grass back in 1998, and Roomba came later in 2002. The Automower was designed as a solar-powered unit.
Now the Automower won’t knock out your lawn early Saturday morning, because it requires about 48 hours to do your lawn the first time, including charging breaks. Then it will daily shave your lawn and use the snipped grass blades as a mulch.
Video depicts the Husqvarna Automower in action on a lawn.
Husqvarna has a line of six Automowers, which range in price from $1,500 for a quarter acre cutting capacity to $3,500 for a full acre. That puts these robots in the same price range as ride-on motors, although the company touts the savings in gas, fertilizer and weed-killing sprays as good reasons to invest in a robomower instead. They’re also extremely quiet (only 56 decibels), which means you won’t hear the robot doing its job. It’ll make those weekends at home a lot more peaceful.
This mower connects to your smartphone, and it responds to Alexa, Siri and Echo.
“We’re developing internal artificial intelligence to allow users to name their mower and speak directly to it without asking Alexa,” Sundstrom said. “So far our experiment works now in simple form, but it behaves like a three-year-old where you have to be firm and it doesn’t always listen.”
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