I have recently been exploring the market of robotic lawn mowers for personal use and am in search of one that can operate autonomously, without the need for cables (with vision, LiDAR SLAM Navigation, or similar), and is capable of covering a somewhat hilly area of 1500 square meters. Although I have a fundamental understanding of the technical aspects that render a lawn mower “robotic,” my knowledge about lawn mowers in general is quite limited since I am relatively new to gardening. Hence, I thought it would be helpful to seek advice from this community.
During my research, I came across the Worx Landroid Vision L1600 WR216E, which, unfortunately, does not appear to be powered by ROS. Ideally, I would prefer a solution powered by ROS 2, as I, like many contributors here, take pride in using robots powered by ROS, a platform we have helped develop.
I have also identified a few companies specializing in this field:
Greenzie appears to offer a compelling value proposition, but I am unsure if I fall into their target customer category since I am not looking to act as an integrator but merely as a user/consumer of a robotic solution.
Kingdom Technologies seems to produce ROS-based solutions, and their product appears promising. I have reached out to them for more information.
Scythe Robotics has a mower that caught my attention, but it seems too large for personal use and potentially too costly for an individual.
FloMobility advertises autonomous lawn mowers using Nav2, but I was unable to find any products available for purchase.
Additionally, I noticed several relatively recent crowdfunding campaigns, many of which appear to be using ROS, but I am somewhat overwhelmed by the options. I would greatly appreciate it if anyone could share their positive or negative experiences with robotic lawn mowers or offer any recommendations or suggestions.
If you’re feeling up to doing some hacking and building it yourself, OpenMower is an interesting project.
From what I’ve seen with a lot of these small robo-mowers, they’re designed for general maintenance mowing of an already well-kept yard. If you flip most of them over and take a look at the blades, you’ll see they’re not particularly robust. You also mention that your yard is a “somewhat hilly area”. Many of these systems might struggle on hills.
A lot of the more robust solutions out there are not going to be focused on the consumer market right now, largely because the sensors used would put the product out of most consumer price ranges. Commercial is a bigger focus at the moment, since the higher use (20-40 hours/week) makes the cost of the mower much more economically feasible.
Thanks for the replies folks. I’m definitely down for some hacking. OpenMower is actually rather well documented but I’m not a huge fan of the GPS-based proposal given my circumstances (big land, pretty cloudy and rainy and likely to be filled with objects and pets). I’d rather rely on something that’s vision or LIDAR-based SLAM. Expanding OpenMower to support this seems like a fun project but I currently don’t have the time.
I reached out to Yard. Let’s see what they have to offer.
I decided to back the following project: Neomox. It’s ROS 2-based (according to what the authors said, they modified Nav2 for it), and seems a good starting point for some robot-hacking. I’ve got very positive experiences with Hong Kong and China-based robotic companies.
Still looking for more alternatives though, in case anyone has more recommendations.
Thanks,