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iRobot Terra Robot Lawn Mower – First Impressions

79 points by apsec112 7y ago

SnowingXIV 7y ago
Has anyone had decent results with these mowers (any brand)? I'm in the process of building a house that's going to have a pretty simple yard and I've considering picking one of these up. 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.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  Consider instead something other than a lawn. They don't call it "green concrete" for nothing. https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-disaster-1826070720 https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-disaster...
  - dawnerd 7y ago
    Depends on your climate. In the PNW for example you don't have to water really so having a nice lawn isn't an ecological disaster that the article would make out.
    - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
      Watering, weeding and fertilizing is not the only problems -- there is also intentional lack of biodiversity. Plants native to the area will always support more.
      - dawnerd 7y ago
        Yep, people should use local grasses and clovers. I've let the clover here take over my back yard and it's been wonderful with attracting bees - plus I don't have to mow it very often.
  - SnowingXIV 7y ago
    Not an option. There is an association and this a new development. I'm just looking to for the most affordable and hands free maintenance aside from hiring out a company to do it which I still might do.
  - cjensen 7y ago
    That was all based on a "green" news article being recycled on gizmodo. The original article was full of incorrect interpretations of data and so forth. E.g. lawns are not, contrary to the original article, the #1 crop by area. 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.
- acomjean 7y ago
  We have a small yard and a Landdroid mower we got 3 years ago. The yard is probably 1000sf It works quite well, though set up involves a perimieter wire which was a pain. 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.
  - efremjw 7y ago
    Same problem here! Squirrels have gnawed through my perimeter wire dozens of times. I have the Husqvarna Automower 450x, which allows for three shortcut home wires. Repairing the broken wire is easy...finding the break, however, is extremely difficult and time consuming. I've had the mower for 2 years and it's been awesome in every other way. I'm thinking of pulling up my entire perimeter wire and installing a new wire deeper. No doubt this will make finding future breaks more difficult, but I hope that by being deeper, the squirrel problem will go away.
    - acomjean 7y ago
      Those squirrels....I found the break by turning the base on and using an AM radio to follow the wire around (it made a kinda tone). When the tone stopped I found the break. The hardest part was finding the radio And getting the batteries... I would assume it would work for the husqvarna perimeter too. The squirrel trying to get to bird feeder : https://youtu.be/cnNqi1hnHY8 https://youtu.be/cnNqi1hnHY8
      - efremjw 7y ago
        Man look at that little critter fly!! I think the principles for using an AM radio are sound. I found two radios, and used them, but I couldn't quite make sense of what I was hearing. Perhaps there was a ton of localized interference. I stepped up my approach by purchasing an underground wire locator from Amazon. This gizmo sends an amplified steady signal down the perimeter wire and a separate portable device listens for the signal as I walk along the perimeter. This didn't work as easily as I'd hoped. My guess is that due to the existence of one very large perimeter wire and three intersecting shortcut-to-home wires, there's some interference/signal degradation that complicates finding the break, especially since there's normally multiple breaks due to the relatively large population of squirrels. There's got to be an easier way to find a break! I think the conclusion here is that I should just keep a bunch of loaded bird feeders to occupy their time!
- Qworg 7y ago
  I used to design and build these - if you have a simple yard, you can use the inexpensive mowers, as long as you don't care about having striping in your lawn. I had one for two seasons, and it was awesome - your lawn looks like it freezes in time and is healthier to boot. You just have to install an "invisible fence" style wire around the perimeter.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  I look at it this way, if it is a waste of time to mow it then you have too much of it. I have nearly 12k sq feet and I still push mow it. Using an electric mower I find the time both relaxing and I can always use the exercise. plus I use the time to see what I need to fix, tweak, or just change out.
  - tclancy 7y ago
    For reference, that's a quarter acre.
  - Marsymars 7y ago
    I switched to a reel mower when my last push mower died, and that's really relaxing without any of the noise or vibration of a gas mower. It is more physically demanding, but like you said, I can always use the exercise.
    - asdff 7y ago
      Maybe mine was just shitty, but it seemed like I needed to take 3 passes with a reel to get an even cut.
      - Marsymars 7y ago
        It's probably less even than a gas mower, but doesn't especially bother me, my lawn isn't a golf green. I've found the real key point is not to let grass get too long between mowing - I have to cut the grass every 3-4 days in peak grass season.
- bluedino 7y ago
  It takes me an hour to mow my lawn. Sometimes I can go a month without cutting it, sometimes I have to cut it every 3 days. Depends on the season, amount of rain, etc. I spend more time doing other crap like weeding, fertilizing, trimming, picking up sticks, etc
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    The benefit of the robot that cuts it all the time is a healthier lawn with fewer slugs, dandelions, ticks and other pests. I cut once a week but it only really looks good the first day or two after cutting. And it’s full of slugs and weeds most of the season. So the robot isn’t really just doing the job you do yourself (weekend cut when it’s too long), it’s maintaining it in a way that’s hard to do manually.
- woodpanel 7y ago
  Go get one. 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
  - SnowingXIV 7y ago
    Exactly why I'm hesitant. The robo-vacuums have been highly disappointing and do a much worse job than taking the few moments to vacuum myself. I still have one that I run constantly because it's slightly better than nothing on a daily basis. 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.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      I had periodically thought about getting a robovac but: - 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.)
    - whywhywhywhy 7y ago
syntaxing 7y ago
By first impressions, I thought this was a hands-on impression. Sad to read that its just reiterating whats been announced a couple months back.
- dawnerd 7y ago
  And posts like these make it hard to trust any of the "review" sites out there when all they do is rehash press releases.
  - trevin 7y ago
    Yeah this is clearly a thin affiliate site churning out content optimized for "robot mowers" and not somebody with any real expertise on the subject.
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    The domain name was a big flag for me that it may not be genuine.
  - scrooched_moose 7y ago
    They admittedly aren't perfect, but Consumer Reports is the only one I remotely trust. So many "review sites" basically just look at the highest rated items on Amazon and create an article out of it. I needed a new beard trimmer recently and it was just page after page of spam. 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.
    - elandrum 7y ago
      Check out Tech Gear Lab and Outdoor Gear Lab. They’re based in Tahoe and the company purchases every single item they test. When they’re done with testing, they often put the gear up for raffles locally to support mountain bike trails and outdoor non-profits. The folks who run it are all really great people.
    - ghaff 7y ago
adrianmonk 7y ago
This article doesn't have a date, but it must be at least a little old. It says: > 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-Lawn-Care-with-Terra-TM-Robot-Mower https://media.irobot.com/2019-01-30-iRobot-R-Reinventing-Law...
ch 7y ago
I feel like they missed a golden opportunity to let users select between various space filling curves for the cut pattern. I, for one, would love to have my lawn cut in a Hilbert Curve pattern.
- shaftway 7y ago
  Get one of the mowers that follows a wire and then embed the wire under the grass in the pattern you want. 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.
  - Seenso 7y ago
    > Get one of the mowers that follows a wire and then embed the wire under the grass in the pattern you want. Isn't it bad for the lawn to mow in a fixed pattern?
    - benglish11 7y ago
      No. I often mow my lawn in a pattern to produce nice stripes. It's also commonly done on sports stadium grass. A pattern (if chosen for efficiency) can actually reduce the wear of riding/pushing a lawn mower over the grass by minimizing the number of passes needed over a given patch of grass.
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    > Get one of the mowers that follows a wire and then embed the wire under the grass in the pattern you want. > Hilbert Curve pattern OP is going to be outside for a while depending on the level of precision of that particular "pattern"...
    - ska 7y ago
      > on the level of precision This is pretty much set by the width of the mower blades - so not a practical issue.
Seenso 7y ago
> The iRobot Terra will use a series of wireless beacons that you place around your yard instead of a perimeter wire. These will provide a wireless, localized positioning signal to allow the iRobot Terra to find it’s way around your lawn. 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.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  What happens when the beacons run out of battery power? 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.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    They could probably easily make them work with solar chargers like those little walkway lights.
- defanor 7y ago
  That's my concern about their home vacuum cleaners as well: if a battery runs out, it would hit my computer. There are some programmable models though (were not available here at the time), and various certainly programmable DIY ones (may be a fun project, but would take some time); that seems like a much better solution -- both for efficiency and predictability (as opposed to random walk), and for this particular case with paths/boundaries (define them once in the robot's memory, maybe even just by moving it manually or otherwise showing it the path/boundaries, and don't rely on batteries in external devices).
  - Seenso 7y ago
    I have one of the random Roombas. The virtual walls are nice for keeping the robot out of areas where it will get stuck, but I rely on making small modifications to the environment to protect things from damage. 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.
Tistel 7y ago
hopefully they can do something like: https://www.sawstop.ca/ https://www.sawstop.ca/ to be safer. or maybe the moisture in the grass might send false positives making it not possible. i just fear an old blind/deaf dog getting hurt (or passed out frat boy).
- ericlewis 7y ago
  Off topic, but kind of funny the first thing you see when opening that is someone missing a finger. I’d think you would want to demonstrate off the bat your product means you keep all 10.
deedubaya 7y ago
I absolutely hate my iRobot vacuum. Constantly getting stuck and does a poor job of actually vacuuming. Not to mention the wireless beacons it requires cost ~1/3 the cost of the actual unit.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  Just buy a Xiaomi vacuum. Half the price, and no wireless beacons needed to be usable. 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.
- MBCook 7y ago
  What wireless beacons? Do you mean the lighthouses that mark ‘no go’ zones? For the record I’m quite happy with mine.
- moduspol 7y ago
  I have the new Roomba (i7) and you can use the app to draw boxes on your floor layout to tell it not to go places. This is good for me because I try to avoid things that need batteries that must be changed.
jpalomaki 7y ago
They mention GPS is not accurate enough and thus different solution is needed. 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.
- karmicthreat 7y ago
  It could work and that plus an IMU is what we were doing at my now recently defunct lawnmower startup. For us to have the precision we needed we had about a 3500$ setup to do so.
  - jcims 7y ago
    Didn't all the jostling of driving over terrain mess with the IMU?
    - karmicthreat 7y ago
      Not really, we were using an IMU with a magnetometer and it was reasonably stable when it was setup correctly. As well as calibrated well. That with the GPS made things stable enough that it was at least a very good demo.
      - jcims 7y ago
        Very cool!
- nullc 7y ago
  You really want a carrier-phase-tracking L1+L2 receiver on each end for that sort of usage which isn't inexpensive (yet). 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.
- musingsole 7y ago
  Combine with an outdoor surveillance system and use the cameras to track and correct the mower's position.
crmrc114 7y ago
I fail to understand how a combination of GPS and Machine vision could not overcome the need for a dedicated telemetry system. 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.
- throwlaplace 7y ago
  your john deere also costs 10x (100x?). accurate gps isn't cheap. here's one of the cheapest chips that gets cm accuracy https://www.swiftnav.com/store/gnss-sensor-volume-orders/piksi-multi-gnss-module https://www.swiftnav.com/store/gnss-sensor-volume-orders/pik... add >$500 to their BOM is probably something they want to avoid
  - karmicthreat 7y ago
    The ublox zed-f9p is probably the most cost effective right now at 200$
- wolrah 7y ago
  > But my John Deere hardware has GPS support for crops and the accuracy is pretty damn spot on. 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.
  - throwlaplace 7y ago
    >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/ 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.
nimbius 7y ago
spoiler: robot lawnmowers have been around for 20 years. they're somewhat popular in Europe. Ireland has robotmow, and Colorado based bigmow has a lawnmower thats almost as wide as a human is tall. >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.
cr0sh 7y ago
This is pretty neat; I had the impression that they were going to make something like this, but kinda put it out of my mind after hearing nothing about it for years. 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...)
karmicthreat 7y ago
It’s a good call for iRobot to skip GPS. You can get 1-2cm precision. But not always and it can be hard to tell when you are off. Plus the equipment is still not inexpensive in a consumer product context. 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.
- foobarian 7y ago
  I'm not a fan of beacons. If I built this for myself I'd probably stick a calibrated camera or two somewhere and use that for localization. Some day...
deleted 7y ago
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aaron695 7y ago
Almost a year old, nothing newer? ><meta property="article:published_time" content="2019-01-30T22:15:19+00:00" />
ngcc_hk 7y ago
I actually have a few cows of different colours coming to my patch to do the mower. My review of them is that they do the job and so far no residue. Just wonder in the old days there is a buffalo. May be my opening is too small for him or is it her (got horns though). Just to ensure they do not sit down as settle down in front of my house is not a good development for my places. It is real. I am not joking.
- catalogia 7y ago
  > so far no residue 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.
- seltzered_ 7y ago
  You might like this Gregory Bateson excerpt about the relationship between horses and grass, and how suburbanites pursue mechanical replacements of such relationships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW3ovmBjQ9I&feature=youtu.be&t=1507 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW3ovmBjQ9I&feature=youtu.be... Honestly hoping I never have a lawn, or pull off some forestry / silvopasture living.

79 points by apsec112 7y ago

Has anyone had decent results with these mowers (any brand)? I'm in the process of building a house that's going to have a pretty simple yard and I've considering picking one of these up. 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.

UnFleshedOne 7y ago
Consider instead something other than a lawn. They don't call it "green concrete" for nothing. https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-disaster-1826070720 https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-disaster...
- dawnerd 7y ago
  Depends on your climate. In the PNW for example you don't have to water really so having a nice lawn isn't an ecological disaster that the article would make out.
  - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
    Watering, weeding and fertilizing is not the only problems -- there is also intentional lack of biodiversity. Plants native to the area will always support more.
    - dawnerd 7y ago
      Yep, people should use local grasses and clovers. I've let the clover here take over my back yard and it's been wonderful with attracting bees - plus I don't have to mow it very often.
- SnowingXIV 7y ago
  Not an option. There is an association and this a new development. I'm just looking to for the most affordable and hands free maintenance aside from hiring out a company to do it which I still might do.
- cjensen 7y ago
  That was all based on a "green" news article being recycled on gizmodo. The original article was full of incorrect interpretations of data and so forth. E.g. lawns are not, contrary to the original article, the #1 crop by area. 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.
acomjean 7y ago
We have a small yard and a Landdroid mower we got 3 years ago. The yard is probably 1000sf It works quite well, though set up involves a perimieter wire which was a pain. 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.
- efremjw 7y ago
  Same problem here! Squirrels have gnawed through my perimeter wire dozens of times. I have the Husqvarna Automower 450x, which allows for three shortcut home wires. Repairing the broken wire is easy...finding the break, however, is extremely difficult and time consuming. I've had the mower for 2 years and it's been awesome in every other way. I'm thinking of pulling up my entire perimeter wire and installing a new wire deeper. No doubt this will make finding future breaks more difficult, but I hope that by being deeper, the squirrel problem will go away.
  - acomjean 7y ago
    Those squirrels....I found the break by turning the base on and using an AM radio to follow the wire around (it made a kinda tone). When the tone stopped I found the break. The hardest part was finding the radio And getting the batteries... I would assume it would work for the husqvarna perimeter too. The squirrel trying to get to bird feeder : https://youtu.be/cnNqi1hnHY8 https://youtu.be/cnNqi1hnHY8
    - efremjw 7y ago
      Man look at that little critter fly!! I think the principles for using an AM radio are sound. I found two radios, and used them, but I couldn't quite make sense of what I was hearing. Perhaps there was a ton of localized interference. I stepped up my approach by purchasing an underground wire locator from Amazon. This gizmo sends an amplified steady signal down the perimeter wire and a separate portable device listens for the signal as I walk along the perimeter. This didn't work as easily as I'd hoped. My guess is that due to the existence of one very large perimeter wire and three intersecting shortcut-to-home wires, there's some interference/signal degradation that complicates finding the break, especially since there's normally multiple breaks due to the relatively large population of squirrels. There's got to be an easier way to find a break! I think the conclusion here is that I should just keep a bunch of loaded bird feeders to occupy their time!
Qworg 7y ago
I used to design and build these - if you have a simple yard, you can use the inexpensive mowers, as long as you don't care about having striping in your lawn. I had one for two seasons, and it was awesome - your lawn looks like it freezes in time and is healthier to boot. You just have to install an "invisible fence" style wire around the perimeter.
Shivetya 7y ago
I look at it this way, if it is a waste of time to mow it then you have too much of it. I have nearly 12k sq feet and I still push mow it. Using an electric mower I find the time both relaxing and I can always use the exercise. plus I use the time to see what I need to fix, tweak, or just change out.
- tclancy 7y ago
  For reference, that's a quarter acre.
- Marsymars 7y ago
  I switched to a reel mower when my last push mower died, and that's really relaxing without any of the noise or vibration of a gas mower. It is more physically demanding, but like you said, I can always use the exercise.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Maybe mine was just shitty, but it seemed like I needed to take 3 passes with a reel to get an even cut.
    - Marsymars 7y ago
      It's probably less even than a gas mower, but doesn't especially bother me, my lawn isn't a golf green. I've found the real key point is not to let grass get too long between mowing - I have to cut the grass every 3-4 days in peak grass season.
bluedino 7y ago
It takes me an hour to mow my lawn. Sometimes I can go a month without cutting it, sometimes I have to cut it every 3 days. Depends on the season, amount of rain, etc. I spend more time doing other crap like weeding, fertilizing, trimming, picking up sticks, etc
- alkonaut 7y ago
  The benefit of the robot that cuts it all the time is a healthier lawn with fewer slugs, dandelions, ticks and other pests. I cut once a week but it only really looks good the first day or two after cutting. And it’s full of slugs and weeds most of the season. So the robot isn’t really just doing the job you do yourself (weekend cut when it’s too long), it’s maintaining it in a way that’s hard to do manually.
woodpanel 7y ago
Go get one. 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
- SnowingXIV 7y ago
  Exactly why I'm hesitant. The robo-vacuums have been highly disappointing and do a much worse job than taking the few moments to vacuum myself. I still have one that I run constantly because it's slightly better than nothing on a daily basis. 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.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    I had periodically thought about getting a robovac but: - 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.)
  - whywhywhywhy 7y ago

syntaxing 7y ago

By first impressions, I thought this was a hands-on impression. Sad to read that its just reiterating whats been announced a couple months back.

dawnerd 7y ago
And posts like these make it hard to trust any of the "review" sites out there when all they do is rehash press releases.
- trevin 7y ago
  Yeah this is clearly a thin affiliate site churning out content optimized for "robot mowers" and not somebody with any real expertise on the subject.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  The domain name was a big flag for me that it may not be genuine.
- scrooched_moose 7y ago
  They admittedly aren't perfect, but Consumer Reports is the only one I remotely trust. So many "review sites" basically just look at the highest rated items on Amazon and create an article out of it. I needed a new beard trimmer recently and it was just page after page of spam. 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.
  - elandrum 7y ago
    Check out Tech Gear Lab and Outdoor Gear Lab. They’re based in Tahoe and the company purchases every single item they test. When they’re done with testing, they often put the gear up for raffles locally to support mountain bike trails and outdoor non-profits. The folks who run it are all really great people.
  - ghaff 7y ago

adrianmonk 7y ago

This article doesn't have a date, but it must be at least a little old. It says: > 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-Lawn-Care-with-Terra-TM-Robot-Mower https://media.irobot.com/2019-01-30-iRobot-R-Reinventing-Law...

ch 7y ago

I feel like they missed a golden opportunity to let users select between various space filling curves for the cut pattern. I, for one, would love to have my lawn cut in a Hilbert Curve pattern.

shaftway 7y ago
Get one of the mowers that follows a wire and then embed the wire under the grass in the pattern you want. 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.
- Seenso 7y ago
  > Get one of the mowers that follows a wire and then embed the wire under the grass in the pattern you want. Isn't it bad for the lawn to mow in a fixed pattern?
  - benglish11 7y ago
    No. I often mow my lawn in a pattern to produce nice stripes. It's also commonly done on sports stadium grass. A pattern (if chosen for efficiency) can actually reduce the wear of riding/pushing a lawn mower over the grass by minimizing the number of passes needed over a given patch of grass.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > Get one of the mowers that follows a wire and then embed the wire under the grass in the pattern you want. > Hilbert Curve pattern OP is going to be outside for a while depending on the level of precision of that particular "pattern"...
  - ska 7y ago
    > on the level of precision This is pretty much set by the width of the mower blades - so not a practical issue.

Seenso 7y ago

> The iRobot Terra will use a series of wireless beacons that you place around your yard instead of a perimeter wire. These will provide a wireless, localized positioning signal to allow the iRobot Terra to find it’s way around your lawn. 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.

reaperducer 7y ago
What happens when the beacons run out of battery power? 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.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  They could probably easily make them work with solar chargers like those little walkway lights.
defanor 7y ago
That's my concern about their home vacuum cleaners as well: if a battery runs out, it would hit my computer. There are some programmable models though (were not available here at the time), and various certainly programmable DIY ones (may be a fun project, but would take some time); that seems like a much better solution -- both for efficiency and predictability (as opposed to random walk), and for this particular case with paths/boundaries (define them once in the robot's memory, maybe even just by moving it manually or otherwise showing it the path/boundaries, and don't rely on batteries in external devices).
- Seenso 7y ago
  I have one of the random Roombas. The virtual walls are nice for keeping the robot out of areas where it will get stuck, but I rely on making small modifications to the environment to protect things from damage. 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.

Tistel 7y ago

hopefully they can do something like: https://www.sawstop.ca/ https://www.sawstop.ca/ to be safer. or maybe the moisture in the grass might send false positives making it not possible. i just fear an old blind/deaf dog getting hurt (or passed out frat boy).

ericlewis 7y ago
Off topic, but kind of funny the first thing you see when opening that is someone missing a finger. I’d think you would want to demonstrate off the bat your product means you keep all 10.

deedubaya 7y ago

I absolutely hate my iRobot vacuum. Constantly getting stuck and does a poor job of actually vacuuming. Not to mention the wireless beacons it requires cost ~1/3 the cost of the actual unit.

xiphias2 7y ago
Just buy a Xiaomi vacuum. Half the price, and no wireless beacons needed to be usable. 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.
MBCook 7y ago
What wireless beacons? Do you mean the lighthouses that mark ‘no go’ zones? For the record I’m quite happy with mine.
moduspol 7y ago
I have the new Roomba (i7) and you can use the app to draw boxes on your floor layout to tell it not to go places. This is good for me because I try to avoid things that need batteries that must be changed.

jpalomaki 7y ago

They mention GPS is not accurate enough and thus different solution is needed. 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.

karmicthreat 7y ago
It could work and that plus an IMU is what we were doing at my now recently defunct lawnmower startup. For us to have the precision we needed we had about a 3500$ setup to do so.
- jcims 7y ago
  Didn't all the jostling of driving over terrain mess with the IMU?
  - karmicthreat 7y ago
    Not really, we were using an IMU with a magnetometer and it was reasonably stable when it was setup correctly. As well as calibrated well. That with the GPS made things stable enough that it was at least a very good demo.
    - jcims 7y ago
      Very cool!
nullc 7y ago
You really want a carrier-phase-tracking L1+L2 receiver on each end for that sort of usage which isn't inexpensive (yet). 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.
musingsole 7y ago
Combine with an outdoor surveillance system and use the cameras to track and correct the mower's position.

crmrc114 7y ago

I fail to understand how a combination of GPS and Machine vision could not overcome the need for a dedicated telemetry system. 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.

throwlaplace 7y ago
your john deere also costs 10x (100x?). accurate gps isn't cheap. here's one of the cheapest chips that gets cm accuracy https://www.swiftnav.com/store/gnss-sensor-volume-orders/piksi-multi-gnss-module https://www.swiftnav.com/store/gnss-sensor-volume-orders/pik... add >$500 to their BOM is probably something they want to avoid
- karmicthreat 7y ago
  The ublox zed-f9p is probably the most cost effective right now at 200$
wolrah 7y ago
> But my John Deere hardware has GPS support for crops and the accuracy is pretty damn spot on. 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.
- throwlaplace 7y ago
  >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/ 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.

nimbius 7y ago

spoiler: robot lawnmowers have been around for 20 years. they're somewhat popular in Europe. Ireland has robotmow, and Colorado based bigmow has a lawnmower thats almost as wide as a human is tall. >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.

cr0sh 7y ago

This is pretty neat; I had the impression that they were going to make something like this, but kinda put it out of my mind after hearing nothing about it for years. 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...)

karmicthreat 7y ago

It’s a good call for iRobot to skip GPS. You can get 1-2cm precision. But not always and it can be hard to tell when you are off. Plus the equipment is still not inexpensive in a consumer product context. 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.

foobarian 7y ago
I'm not a fan of beacons. If I built this for myself I'd probably stick a calibrated camera or two somewhere and use that for localization. Some day...

deleted 7y ago

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aaron695 7y ago

Almost a year old, nothing newer? ><meta property="article:published_time" content="2019-01-30T22:15:19+00:00" />

ngcc_hk 7y ago

I actually have a few cows of different colours coming to my patch to do the mower. My review of them is that they do the job and so far no residue. Just wonder in the old days there is a buffalo. May be my opening is too small for him or is it her (got horns though). Just to ensure they do not sit down as settle down in front of my house is not a good development for my places. It is real. I am not joking.

catalogia 7y ago
> so far no residue 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.
seltzered_ 7y ago
You might like this Gregory Bateson excerpt about the relationship between horses and grass, and how suburbanites pursue mechanical replacements of such relationships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW3ovmBjQ9I&feature=youtu.be&t=1507 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW3ovmBjQ9I&feature=youtu.be... Honestly hoping I never have a lawn, or pull off some forestry / silvopasture living.