iRobot Terra Robot Lawn Mower – First Impressions
myrobotmower.com
myrobotmower.com
Amazon reviews are so manipulated they're nearly useless now. Reddit isn't too bad, at least for the most part they are real people.
Only drawback is that you change the length by replacing the guard instead of just sliding it to a different position; one day I didn't notice the guard was off and with one swipe it was too late to salvage my beard. I removed the rest and started over; luckily I keep it short anyway.
The issue with the cord can be greatly improved by having a nice retractible extension cord. Easy to take out, easy to put back, easy to move, easy to store.
I've had pretty good results with this. I started using it after I bought a couple of VERY highly rated books that were just unreadably bad. I checked them on FakeSpot and they all had abysmal ratings when the fake reviews were removed.
> iRobot has finally announced that it will launch the Terra robot lawn mower later in 2019
Looks like iRobot's announcement was January 30, 2019:
https://media.irobot.com/2019-01-30-iRobot-R-Reinventing-Law...
I, for one, would love to have my lawn cut in a Hilbert Curve pattern.
I remember seeing one of these where a guy would mow outside a pattern at one height, then adjust the height of the mower and mow the inside of the pattern so the grass was longer, giving him a noticeable pattern. Can't find a link at the moment though.
Isn't it bad for the lawn to mow in a fixed pattern?
> Hilbert Curve pattern
OP is going to be outside for a while depending on the level of precision of that particular "pattern"...
This is pretty much set by the width of the mower blades - so not a practical issue.
On the other hand, hilbert curves seem to have a lot of right-angle corners, which maybe would slow the mower.
What happens when the beacons run out of battery power?
The biggest fear I have with a robot lawnmower is that it somehow escapes its boundary and wanders the neighborhood and injures a person or pet with its spinning blade. And it's pointless to have one if you have to supervise it to safeguard against rare faults in its boundary detection system.
In the case of a computer, you could try putting it on a short platform (no more than an inch high is sufficient) or positioning it so cables are in spaces narrower than the robot can access. The latter is what I do. The back of the case is a few inches from a wall, and the cables are routed upwards into cable guides mounted under the desk. I mostly did that for aesthetics rather than the Roomba, though.
If it doesn't do that, then the other annoying thing it sometimes does is drive off into a bedroom and go underneath our king-size bed, then "dies" (runs out of battery) somewhere in the middle of the bed area, which makes it very difficult to coax out. Neither my arms nor my wife's are long enough to reach it; I generally have to use a broom handle or such to shove it closer to one side to pull it out.
First-world problems, right?
A surprising amount of furniture already comes with levelers (1) that no one ever adjusts. Raise them up 1/4" and it can then pass under. If not, tacking on some small furniture glides are usually enough (2).
1) https://c1.neweggimages.com/ProductImage/A27C_1_201906171218... 2) https://i.etsystatic.com/17715291/r/il/b873a3/1550855907/il_...
These have the advantage of allowing it to clean under the furniture as well. Every time ours got stuck I'd adjust the height a bit and haven't had a problem in over a year.
You might want to take a look at these. I've found them very useful for situations like that:
So? It's a vacuum, you could drive it right in to a computer non-stop until the battery runs out and it's not going to do any meaningful damage. The worst case scenario would be if you had a case where the power or reset button was right there at vacuum height, but other than that what's your concern?
On that note, I love my Botvac. My biggest complaint though is that it has to "learn" a room first, without any sort of helping functionality. This is a problem in my eyes because the Botvac comes with an awesome in-app barrier system where you can tell it to avoid areas, but to tell it to avoid areas it has to have done a normal scan of that area.
It's a chicken-egg scenario. I can't keep the botvac out of my fragile areas without first letting it in my fragile areas.
Once scanned though, the Botvac's "no go" lines are awesome, and very accurate in my experience.
> you could drive it right in to a computer non-stop until the battery runs out and it's not going to do any meaningful damage
What is this based on (i.e., are HDDs and all the smaller components commonly designed to withstand such shocks)?
Now I've looked up a random WD Blue HDD data sheet [1], which mentions 30G shock (read/write, 2 ms). If a vacuum cleaner was to hit it directly while moving at about 1 m/s (less than 4 km/h, and it seems to walk at around that speed, though I haven't found exact values), and assuming that it would accelerate the HDD to its own speed in those 2 ms (maybe it's not realistic, though not obvious to me), that'd be about 50G (1 m/s / 0.002 s / 9.8). Even if it is so, a vacuum cleaner has a plastic bumper, a computer case is heavy, and a vacuum won't hit any of those components directly, but it seems dangerously close and I'd rather not hit the computer.
[1] https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...
You need to conserve the momentum and kinetic energy, so assuming an elastic collision you're going to accelerate the PC to about half the speed of roomba[1] so you're looking at closer to 25G. With the plastic bumper, you're not getting anywhere near an elastic collision and your contact time is probably a lot longer than .002 due to the deflection. I would not worry too much about this.
http://www.convertalot.com/elastic_collision_calculator.html
1. They're worst case numbers, as in the hard drive being mounted perpendicular to the impact force. Some OEM crapbox PCs may have spinning rust mounted to the front of the case directly in a vertical orientation, but most PCs have them mounted horizontally and many use shock absorbing rubber bushings.
2. As noted, your numbers also assume an inelastic collision. Almost all PC cases have a plastic front, and all robo-vacs I'm aware of have the same.
3. The absolute peak potential impact force is significantly less than a single accidental kick or kid/pet running in to it.
If you're really concerned about impact, you should get your PC off the floor. That said, I'd happily frisbee a Roomba at my PC and not be concerned for anything other than the front panel of the case itself.
So you can have a constellation of n, resulting in a battery failure tolerance rate of (n-3) / n %.
If you are worried, increase n.
The insurance market for lawnmower liability admittedly isn't as well developed.
FWIW, the indoor beacons for its Roomba machines last a very long time. Mine go four to six months on a pair of AA batteries. Since these new ones are for outside, I hope they have larger batteries and last even longer.
So unless you are a deaf gecko pet, I don't see much of a problem... But it's an American forum and this is not a legal advice.
It is real. I am not joking.
I think your cows might be constipated. ;)
Incidentally I've heard of farmers renting out goats to mow difficult terrain, particularly on steep hills next to roads.
Honestly hoping I never have a lawn, or pull off some forestry / silvopasture living.
They are also substantially more expensive than the typical electric mowers you push yourself but if it saves x hours per week/month could be worth it. I just don't want to end up with an expensive paperweight and end up having to buy another mower anyways.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-disaster...
Lawns in general are green by being carbon sinks. But as with all things, it depends. If you live in the midwest with plenty of summer rain, the lawn costs very little. If you're in Arizona or California, water use is an issue.
A critter eat through the wire this year, which means the mower stoped working. Figuring it out is was a perimeter wire break and where was a little tricky and involved using an am radio. Generally happy with the device.
The squirrel trying to get to bird feeder :
You just have to install an "invisible fence" style wire around the perimeter.
It is more physically demanding, but like you said, I can always use the exercise.
I spend more time doing other crap like weeding, fertilizing, trimming, picking up sticks, etc
Used to own robo-vacuum cleaners of many brands, eventually sold them all, as each of them caused more work than they were supposed to spare me. After that I was reluctant to get a robomower but it is worth it.
Pros:
- you have to buy machinery anyways (if you're new to having a yard)
- less noise
- it will get mowed more often
- more mows -> healthier lawn
Setup cons:
- you have to bury/hammer a wire into the ground surrounding the area to-be-mowed
- you may have to expand/change your wifi-setup because mower/base-station need access as well
- like with robomowers, decoration is an obstacle. It will either get destoryed or destroy the bot
- because of this, need to have less decoration or need to surround them by wires as well
Recurrent cons:
- obstacles hit can (and will) cause blades to break free
- bc of this I have to replace the blades every 2-3 months (the only real maintenance to be done)
- at least try to find the lost blades (unless you're ok with guests/kids stepping into some unexpected, dirty, rusty, crooked blade
These cons don't seem terrible. Maybe in a few months we'll see some new ones on the market and see prices a bit more competitive. Appreciate all the input.
- They're expensive, especially the high-end ones.
- They'd only do a portion of the house, albeit the part that gets the most traffic
- However, it's also the portion of the house that tends to have a pile or two of stuff that's being prepared for a trip or has just come back from a trip, various cords here and there, etc.
In the end, I ended up just getting a cordless vac that I can pull out in a few seconds if some vacuuming is needed. (I have a housekeeper who comes every month or so, so it's mostly about doing some light touchup between full cleanings.)
Probably my fave tech purchase this decade.
I think if I were to do it over (my lawnmower startup blew up) I’d do something like this and just drive the beacon cost down as much as possible. I had looked at using the DW1000 but the rest of the team wanted something beaconless for commercial applications.
Could you do local differential-GPS solution? Put the ”base station” to charging base (which likely remains static) and transmit the correction information over wifi or using some unlicensed frequency.
The beacons also could be adopted by future indoor projects of theirs... that would be really nice. My roomba gets lost easily when it starts getting dark out.
I found an old Friendly Robotics lawn mower robot on Craigslist and purchased it for $50, thinking of using it for my lawn but I never got around to doing anything with it. Mainly because I couldn't think of an easy way to detect the perimeter of the lawn without an edge wire!
I guess it's not an easy problem to solve.
I had considered a bunch of options, a few of the ideas I had were:
1. Some kind of camera or color sensor, looking downward, to detect "green" vs "non-green" - assuming the grass was green and non-grass would be some other color. That would work ok for most of my yard, but my lawn in front doesn't have an "edge" with the neighbor's lawn - so it would mow their lawn, too - not what I want.
2. A passive perimeter, consisting of a bunch of spaced (maybe 6" between?) magnets - I thought maybe plastic golf tees with a rare-earth magnet glued on top would be ok; then use hall-effect sensors on the robot's perimeter to determine if it had crossed over the line of magnets.
3. This one was more to detect cut vs uncut grass - but use some kind of humidity sensor; assuming cut grass has higher humidity than uncut grass, "sniff" the ground and avoid uncut (drier) areas. The problem with this concept, mainly, was in not being able to find high-speed humidity sensors/detectors.
At any rate, I never followed through with any of this, but maybe someday I might return to it? I am curious on the cost of this iRobot lawn mower, though. I'm guessing 4 figures, given what I know about the price of their vacuums (which my wife loves; every time one dies, she buys a new one, and the old one I save for my future Roomba army to take over the world with).
If my guess is accurate, then I'll just have to put off buying one, as it will still be cheaper to continue to pay my landscaper to cut my lawn (and this robot won't trim trees or bushes yet, so...)
I mean yeah if you don't want to build a machine vision system to handle this I guess.... But my John Deere hardware has GPS support for crops and the accuracy is pretty damn spot on.
https://www.swiftnav.com/store/gnss-sensor-volume-orders/pik...
add >$500 to their BOM is probably something they want to avoid
To get that level of accuracy they're using differential GPS where another fairly expensive device is placed at a known location and transmits a signal indicating the amount and direction of the error in the signal received from the satellites. The receiver on the tractor then uses this information to correct the signal and get much greater accuracy than would otherwise be available.
This is not available in consumer-grade receivers.
not true. i posted a link in a sibling comment but you can use two piksis with one as the base and one as the rover to get sub cm differential rtk. you can also use NOAA CORS station (if you're within 10km) to get precise ppk
https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/CORS/
for this use case i would set the base down at a fixed location and let it solve. then i would wait a day for CORS data to get accurate gps for the base and plan out my trajectories relative to that base (using whatever registered maps they use). alternatively you could survey the location where the base sits.
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>One of the key features of the iRobot Terra is that it will not use a perimeter wire to mark the boundary of the lawn.
So the Terra is short for Terra-fying I take it. We havent even built an autonomous automobile that doesnt occasionally mow down an errant jay-walker, yet somehow a bladed autonomous vehicle is going to be safer? At least with Robotmow and competitors you have boundaries. You can run or crawl to safety if there were to be an accident. Nothing in the review seems to indicate theres even the potential for this device to detect a human presence. and a smartphone app? One good hack, and you now have a lawnmower that drives into a pool full of children, or a lawnmower that persistence hunts pets to exhaustion and turns them into gulash while youre at work.
It gets stuck as well by default, but I set up a lot of red zones on the app and now it finishes perfectly almost every time.
For the record I’m quite happy with mine.
This is good for me because I try to avoid things that need batteries that must be changed.