Anyone want to cut my lawn for me today? I really need to get serious about building a robot lawn mower. What’s up with the commercial ones costing well over the $1k mark? I’m thinking of building one starting with a Homelite 12 volt rechargable mower. I should be able to put casters on the front, add a couple drive motors in back and some sort of bump sensor to turn randomly. Should work like a Roomba on steroids.
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It’s crazy that commercial robot lawn mowers cost so much. I can understand that manual lawn mowers must cost hundreds of dollars; they have to do a perfect job on a lawn-mower-sized area of grass in about a third of a second. They have to be powerful to do this, and they need updraft.
But robot lawn mowers can mosey around the yard all week. They needn’t be powerful, and so they also needn’t be very robustly built. They needn’t start on the first pull; they don’t need a big honking blade; they don’t need to be made out of metal. Made in a large quantity, a serviceable, low-end robot mower should cost around $100 (not including the battery, which should cost another $50, and not including the perimeter wire, which should cost around $30).
I think the reason available robot mowers cost a bundle is that there are lots of manual mowers out there that cost $400, making a $1000 price tag for a robot mower (certainly preferable to a manual mower) seem less ridiculous.
I got so peved about this that I made my own robot lawn mower from a child’s ride-on toy (a Power Wheels Barbie Jeep). If you wanna see it, there’s a video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuXqg4q3cQ8
Thanks for the link, the pink wheels are awesome! I’ll post the Youtube up soon.
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