Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

The fact that lawn mowing or carpet cleaning isn’t automated yet makes me think self driving cars are the biggest pipe dream ever.

View on HN

These things are meant to be fab:

https://www.husqvarna.com/au/products/robotic-lawn-mowers/

But also pricey. A couple of K for one.

Where do the clippings go?

They leave the clippings to fertilize the lawn.

From what I've read about it, it cuts (nearly) every day, so the clippings aren't long and are essentially "mulched" without using a specialized mulching blade.

My dad just got one of those, but gave it back. You have to install a lot of wire for the lawnmower and even then it made problems (mowed the flowers). They have a weird garden though, so one take this with a grain of salt, but in my eyes the problem is definitely not solved. The hardware is great, but the software is too simple and does not use any CV or ML at all. Maybe I'm thinking too simple, but recognising grass and using SLAM shouldn't be that hard nowadays, so why don't they do it yet?

Yeah but they do it in a weird way. You never get that "just cut" look.

Lawns are actually interesting because it wouldn't have to stop at mowing.

Lawncare involves a lot of well-defined tasks on a well-defined surface. A lawnmower bot could also have a hopper to dispense fertilizer and seed. In a more extreme, force-intensive form, it could even dispense topsoil or aerate.

In winter? Salt my driveway and sidewalk (assuming ploughing is out-of-scope for this particular robot).

Don't forget dandelion eradication! Crabgrass plucking! edging!

Well, weeding might be a bit more of a computer-vision challenge - normal lawnwork's vision needs are "is this lawn Y/N". Edging would be an interesting challenge too.

I'd prefer an art-bot that would playfully disperse dandelion seeds.

HOAs HATE this one robot!!

Interestingly, robot lawn mowers are enormously more common in europe than in the US. (They also apparently kill a lot of hedgehogs, which wouldn't be an issue in the states).

I don't know if this is because lawns tend to be smaller in europe or some weird cultural pride thing, but they totally exist and are identically capable to roombas.

Carpet cleaning should also be pretty comparable - there are many sweeping ones - though the robot would necessarily be larger. I suspect the market isn't there

True, in the states, 'kills gophers' would be one of the bullet point features. People would probably buy specialized robots whose sole purpose is killing gophers if it was effective, as scary of a prospect as that is.

Transportation is 100 or 1000x the market that lawn mowing or carpet cleaning is.

But pehaps infinity more challenging

Yup. Our tolerance for failure is orders of magnitude lower for household appliances than cars. My robot vaccum can't make it a week without doing something where it needs human intervention. I'm also very forgiving in my interactions with it: I move out of the way, I pick up things in front of it, and I just ignore when it bumps into me.

That tolerance goes away when it's a high-powered 1-ton machine with the potential to kill dozens with one error, one that has to work flawlessly in a very quirky environment tuned for human perceptions and expert human users. There is no piece of software (or software-driven hardware) I've used where I'd say: "Yes, this is at a level where I'd trust it unsupervised when lives are at stake."

I think anybody expecting robot cars in the next few years will be wildly disappointed.

I see robot lawn movers all over Europe.

you can send your kids out to mow the lawn. you can't make your kids drive you to work.

Arn't lawn mowing automated already ? All my aunts and uncles are too old to do it themselves now and bought a robot to do it.

Stuff like these, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LlaaV2iMb0 scoots around and keeps the lawn decent, goes back to its charging station when needed.

I hope robotic lawn mowers won't be wide-spread, or good-bye ecology and its diversity.

I mean, the bigger problem from an ecological perspective is lawns themselves but that's a whole other can of worms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com