Hi all, this is my first post to Let's Make Robots so if (when) I make a mistake, please forgive me.
So my project that I have been asked is to help my Grandparents with mowing their lawn. They are 87 and 90 and are unable to mow their lawn. The worst part is that there is close to 15 acres of lawn to mow in 7 seperate lawns seperated by 3 roads that circle the properity. And the terrain is rocky, steep in some places, and has trees and a fire pit ( 25 ft x 25 ft). Oh and most important is the fact that anything that grandpa touches seems to break on contact so I need this to be fully autonomous.
To handle that my idea is a tank tred robot that has two wheel chair motors powering them. Also two mower blades powered by one motor. As far as electronics it will be controlled by an Arduino. So far what I have thought of as far as sensors would be a GPS, 3 axis compass, 3 bump sensors, humitiy sensor. Finally to recharge it self have a specific spot that it drives to when the battery is low to charge via solar panel.
What I need help with is making this actually work. And help with any other sensors that I might need. And help with writing code to program this whole thing.
Thanks in advance for all your help everyone it's greatly appreciated
Ok so it sounds like this task is impossible. Is there any way that this lawn bot could be possible? What if I used the gps to just get to the individual lawns and then used burried wire to guide it around? Or I could just burry enough cable to line the entire properity. What would be the "easiest " way to do it?
and for just a second, I think I can do anything. Given a team, several years of R&D, a large fortune to be reduced to a small fortune, nothing is impossible. Landing a man on the moon seemed a pipe dream when Kennedy said we would do it. And we did it.
Building a robot is hard. This is technically possible although impractical. I have been in tech 15 years, and building a robot to sweep my kitchen took me several months of every spare moment and several hours a night to get right. The amount of time I spent is a bit embarassing. I tried to do it from scratch all on the cheap which inthe long run ended up costing more. I burned chips out, ruined a few expensive boards, destroyed a few motors and just spent huge amounts of time reading books, surfing the net to learn electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and a spin on computer programming. None of which I am anywhere near master level at. But it just takes time.
Meanwhile, their lawn is growing. If money is no object, look at the autonomous farm equipment. Autonomous lawn mowers are pretty small and aimed toward suburban lawns ie less than an acre and each of these runs $1500 -2500. Depending on terrain, where power is available to recharge these beasts, you would need several at least? You could lay a lot of wire but these bots are just weed trimmers really and I would be suspect of the job they would do and how they would hold up over all the rough terrain and heavy use.
The cost effective solution would be to hire landscapers to do a few acres close to the house every week, and then have them 3x a year hit the rest of their property. They have the equipment to do it fast and relatively cheaply.
Good luck. It is sweet you want to help them. Hire a landscaper and be done with it.
