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Comment by toisanji | Hacker News Reader

I built a robot with tensorflow running on the raspberry pi to do autonomous driving and computer vision: http://www.jtoy.net/portfolio/

I'm working on the next version to make it more useful, but all the technology is not there yet, I want the robot to be able to understand speech and talk back to users. I also want the robot to be able to play games with people. I think the platform has a lot of potential. I want Google to release a low power tensor processing unit made for the pi to make this more useful. This will open up a lot of doors for robot and AI enthusiasts. I'm looking to turn this into a platform, contact me if this is of interest to you.

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I'm extremely interested in using autonomous driving and computer vision for a lawnmower. I hate mowing my lawn. I hate mowing my lawn enough to program a robot to mow it for me.

I would hate to live next door to you and your intelligent, self-aware lawnmower.

Now I want to watch the movie Lawnmower Man, lol

Oh yeahhhhh..... that chick

To clarify: it's that sound/guy saying "Oh yeah..." in slow-motion, sexy hahaha, greased up lawn mower guy and Pierce Brosnan, no sun laser for this guy.

How come? Genuine question, I've been living in an apartment for a while.

You'd be super jealous! I'd share, though.

Since you control the machine and your yard, you can use cameras mounted to your house for tracking. You don't want smart, you want dumb and predictable. But good luck making something with a rapidly spinning blade safe while unsupervised.

It's probably cheaper to hire a landscape maintenance company, or a neighborhood teenager.

good luck making something with a rapidly spinning blade safe while unsupervised

Then don't! If it's autonomous it can be out there all the time rather than once a week/whatever, no spinning blade needed. Plan B? Buy a goat.

> Buy a goat

Nah. What we really want and need is a robot that while it mows the lawn, turns it into: its entire energy source, its entire pool of building blocks for daily (nightly?) self-repairs, for reproduction, for producing oh maybe fluffy warm wool and delicious milk/cheese/butter as a side product, and fertilizes the land from the occasional .. discharge resulting from perpetual energy production-consumption and internal cleanups/repairs, finally as it still does wear down as all physical assemblages are wont to with time, it leaves behind highly durable inputs for sturdy clothing and stylish home decoration (horns, hides, leather etc)!

All from a friggin lawn.

Roboruminant 2.0 baby. Need to reinvent mammalian evolution before we can really reinvent the wheel!

Plan C, turn the yard into a garden.

If only goats would refrain from eating everything in a yard. Like flower gardens? Plant a tree sapling? Bushes?

Which is awesome because there is no long lawn on Friday nights. It can be continually mowed.

Lawn mowers are already safe enough to operate in nothing but your underwear while drinking a beer. I know this because I've seen people do it.

I'd call that safe enough to operate unsupervised in an enclosed yard.

> Lawn mowers are already safe enough to operate in nothing but your underwear

And if in doubt, just wear under-armour instead..

> You don't want smart, you want dumb and predictable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMOASdSu9YU

I'd be worried about the rope breaking! Sitting there watching it mow is better than actually mowing myself, but I mostly want the time back. My yard is way too big for my self-propelled electric lawn mower. I don't want to spend 1.5 hours every Saturday anymore.

Get an electric one and use the cord instead of the rope.

If you hate it so much, I would recommend instead buying one of the autonomous lawn mowers that have been on the market for years now, set it and forget it. (Maybe take it in for the winter.)

I've heard good things about the Husqvarna 450 especially.

Spoiler alert: there is no computer vision involved, still works perfectly even for large lawns; our local university even uses them in campus parks.

http://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/robotic-lawn-mowers/

A series of video blogs about the Husqvarna lawn mower by all around nice bloke and home automation guy, Jon Oxer.

http://www.superhouse.tv/19-husqvarna-automower-basics/

http://www.superhouse.tv/superhouse-vlog-47-husqvarna-automo...

http://www.superhouse.tv/superhouse-vlog-48-pausing-the-husq...

http://www.superhouse.tv/superhouse-vlog-49-automower-securi...

There seem to be a lot of these on the market already https://www.amazon.com/Roomba-Lawn-Mower/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh...

Here is a library that just been submitted : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13498219

Donkey: a self driving library and control platform for small scale DIY vehicles

I realize the point of the article and many of the comments are about using homebrew ML/computer vision, but if you want something quick and easy, commercially available robot lawn mowers already exist. However, they tend to use boundary wires rather than any sort of vision system (some have gps, but I'm not sure if that's supplemental or can be used alone) though I think some have obstacle sensors for safety.

http://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/robotic-lawn-mowers/

http://www.deere.com/en_INT/products/equipment/robotic_mower...?

http://www.honda.co.uk/lawn-and-garden/products/miimo-2015/o...

Do you have more details on your T-bot project available somewhere? Sounds pretty interesting

I just completed the first version last month for an art show. I'm preparing docs to share for it now.

That would be great! I bought a kit of accessories for the arduino/rpi for my son. He's really getting into building simple robots from Lego Technic. It would be great to incorporate some more advanced projects into his list.

just today i was fantasizing about a self-driving autonomous office coffee machine. basically a roomba that brews coffee. perfect for hardcore introverts.

Add a speaker and media player, and you could have DJ Barista!

Just what I don't need -- being forced to interact with a DJ to get my coffee.

"What do you want?"

"Coffee."

"I CAN'T HEAR YOU! I SAID WHAT DO YOU WANT?!"

"Give me coffee or I will end you."

For the true introvert, I've heard that it's possible to brew your own coffee at home!

I buy instant coffee at ALDI. We have a Keurig, but the pods cost a small fortune, and I drink far too much coffee.

I always said the hallmark of a great tool is something that can do 50 things in a shitty way. "ALEXA. ALEXA. SIRI! OKAY GOOGLE? Come here self-driving roomba. Play NPR podcasts and brew me a tepid cup of brown Keurig water while engaging me in a rousing game of Go"

"Ok. Now deleting your appointments for this week."

You forgot sex/porn. It has to satisfy all our needs.

Hey Jason, I'm working on a platform where people can control other people's robots. We're leveraging crowd intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence, but we'd like to incorporate artificial intelligence soon. Perhaps you'd have some interest to check it out. We're at http://runmyrobot.com.

This site reminds me of https://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon

This is not what I expected when I read your comment. I was expecting a platform where you upload the parameters of a hardware system, the platform digitizes that system into a virtual sandbox, and people can then write arbitrary programs for that system and showcase them in the sandbox, where the uploader can buy, comment, and rate those programs. Something along the lines of https://openai.com/blog/

I'm wondering why we don't see robotic chips and pretrained models that solve basic tasks such as vision, audio, NLP and behavior. We already have good models for all of them, but no simple way to mix and match. It would be great if this evolved into an open-source bazaar of neural net models and hardware parts.

This is why I've invested in Nvidia and a bit in AMD. My assumption is they will get into this business. Their first product would most likely be some vision processor for self driving cars.

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