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Comment by k7sune | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn’t it be kidnapped easily if it doesn’t use wires or GPS?

I often wonder about this.

I think GPS is essential. Tie it to a location - if stolen, it won't operate. Then a way to text you if it is moved outside the designated area. Telling you where it is.

At that point, I suppose it would still be worth stealing just for the battery? A hard problem to solve.

The problem with gps is it doesn't work (reliably) under trees which many lawns have. Since trees are common in yards they need something else anyway and at that point you can get rid of the gps

Need to get the multi-gnss like my cycling computer from Garmin has

It's so accurate it's scary. Shows me the what side of the road I'm on and even shows me how much I'm in the lane lol

that doesn't help when there is no signal which happens. Sometimes you can use other input to get more accurate, but only sometimes

> if stolen, it won't operate.

I can assure you it won't have level of protection like say iPhone, there will be a factory reset button in the mower.

Not super helpful if it doesn't have a way to communicate to the outside world. Some of the companies solve this by adding a cell module that can send an SOS, but it usually requires a monthly/yearly fee to maintain the cell connection.

In my case, my lawn isn't easily accessible and also not visible from the street (because the house and garage is between the street and the garden), and I trust my neighbors. So, I think (I hope) this isn't so much an issue for my case.

I think the eufy has also an optional GPS module just for this purpose, to better track it. I don't think this GPS module has any other purpose (e.g. it would not be used for navigation). But I didn't really checked the details on this.

I have seen this a few times for such robots, that you can buy an optional GPS module for tracking.

The sudden desire to add a small LLM and speech synthesizer so the mower can yell for help in a stranger danger scenario.

Third law of robotics: self protect!

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