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Comment by knicholes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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..

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...

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

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

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

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.

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...

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

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