DIY Robot Lawn Mower

Home-made robot lawn mower. Barbie Jeep + control system + blades & motors. Uses buried wire (electronic dog fence), bumpers, and flaps for navigation. Biased random steering.

Transcript:
So here's the world famous pink and green lawn mower. Pink for these wheels -- this thing started out life as a Barbie Jeep -- and green for this battery -- doesn't use any gas. It's, uh, got little bumpers...I'll show you how those things work. It's got little flaps...coated with aluminum so that when they touch, the mower knows it's hit something. It's got a little control system -- a *really* little control system: couple of NAND gates, couple of timers, some relays, stuff like that. And that's the basic mower that just responds to the bumpers and the flaps.

But it's also got -- I don't know if you can see it -- some coils down here that listen to my electronic dog fence, and a circuit I got off the internet that reads those guys, and treats them just like the bumpers or the flaps, so whenever it hits something it goes in the other direction, until it hits
something and then it goes in the other direction. So...

Let me turn it over, and take a look at the cutters. There's three motors with little plastic wheels [disks] on them, little razor blades attached to the wheels [disks], and that's it for the cutting.

There you can see the...what I salvaged from the Barbie Jeep, the motors and the wheels and the chassis.

It's got an independent suspension, so it doesn't get hung up too much. Here I'll show you how that works. I don't know if you can see it. Anyway, without this it gets stuck all the time.

So, that's, that's the mower. Let me plug it in [connect it to the battery] and turn it on.

Oh, and one more thing I didn't show you...the steering. Steering is mostly random; it's not controlled. But there is this little scrubber here, so that when the mower's going forwards, it tries to turn the wheel to the right; When the mower's going backwards, it tries to turn the wheel to the left, so it doesn't go back and forth over the same path all the time.

All right let me turn it on.

[Music: "Guinea Pig's Quest"]

[Music: "Waltz of the Toddlers"]

Oh, it runs like this for about an hour. Maybe an hour and a half. Gets most of the grass in this yard. But, you know, it leaves a little bit. I don't care about that. Eventually it gets it all. This yard hasn't been cut by anything else for about a year, so you can see eventually it gets it all. But it doesn't get the edges at all. You gotta do that with a lawn mower. I'm not going to worry about that.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• robot
• lawn
• mower
• grass
• cut
• cutter
• garden
• technology
• diy
• environment
• electronic
• battery
• motor
• pink
• green
• barbie
• jeep
• automatic
• autonomous
• homemade

[Deepblue466]

I dont think utility knife blades would work to good at cutting grass

[colorclocks]

@Deepblue466 They're great at cutting grass. What they're not so good at is hitting nongrassy stuff laying around in the yard. They break pretty easily.

[atomgonuclear]

It's an intresting idea, but not very practical.  The random bumping could take hours to mow a lawn depending on the pattern. The battery would probably die by then. Also... razor blades? Common man that is just ghetto. A regular lawn mower blade which is 10x thicker has a hard time lasting more than 12 cuts.

[colorclocks]

@atomgonuclear We could find out, you know, whether or not it's a practical idea. We could, for example, build one and see how long it takes to cut grass, how long the battery lasts, how long the blades remain usefully sharp, etc.. Oh wait. I already did that. If only I had made a couple of YouTube videos about it, so we wouldn't have all these unanswered questions. Oh wait. I did that too.

[crawldood]

Neat idea! I think I would use dog fence as a grid though, to make it lots more efficient :-) a sensor in front of the mower could just follow the wire that you create a mowing pattern with :-) just a thought :-)

[colorclocks]

@crawldood A good thought. That would make the mower much more efficient. But it would be much more work. Always the tradeoff.

[colorclocks]

Vegetables are no fun to walk on.

[d1rtyd33z]

@colorclocks does it leave little foot killers in the yard when they break off? ouch.

[smartstuff2buy]

I need you guys to build for me, thegoodrobot@yahoo.com

Anyone interested?

[csdesign73]

Would a like trim line work better or one of the add on things they have out. I love the idea very much. Plus really if people it will not cut the lawn that well with it moving around like that. Think of the Roomba Robot does just about the same thing it is doing and it does cover the whole room. Plus it does take some time. The only thing is if you use it most of the time it will just keep most of grass down. I thought about taking the hard wear out of a old one we have now.

[smartstuff2buy]

Can u contact me about making me one. I have big plans and u will like them.

Thegoodrobot@yahoo.com

TJ

[HolyGuyz]

@Prior23 LOL, yeah!

[Prior23]

@HolyGuyz Looks to me like its a rocking bench.