Between the action of building a robotic lawn mower or buying one from the market is the willing to change your mornings while unleashing your skills in the DIY area. Take one of these projects and it will instantly make your day better, and help you start your day off right.
You have tons of opportunities to build from scratch or customize an off the shelf platform and build what is called a lawn mowing robot.
Autonomous or not, electric or on gasoline, with two or four wheel drive, build entirely from plastic or metal, all the projects explored in this article are the best from a long list of hackers and makers that loves (like you) to hack or modify things.
From now on, I will start to look into six of the most creative and interesting robot mower creations crafted in garages or rooms. Even better, most of the creators share full details and instructions to replicate these projects in your prototyping room.
Caution: a lawn mower robot is not a toy. You should take care and do not use in children or pets area. This kind of robot may produce severe injuries since it uses blades and high power motors.
- 1. A robot lawnmower
This robot doesn’t need a perimeter wire to mow your lawn. It is autonomous and require a perimeter surrounded by a high border with at least 10 cm in height.To build this project, you do not need programming skills. The designer uses relays to “program” the vehicle moves and claims to cut about 500 square meters in 1 or 2 hours. More than that, you have the schema and a list of components and materials to build the robot from scratch.
- 2. Lawnbot400
Lawnbot400 is a remote controlled lawn mower with an Arduino inside it. It uses two drive wheels to explore your lawn and turn the platform. The wheelchair motors that move around the platform are electric while the mower uses a gas-powered motor. Finally, the platform can be adapted to work autonomously.
- 3. autoCut
I love this project. From my point of view, this is the most completed DIY lawn mower robot. autoCut is an autonomous bot programmed to use a battery charging station instead connected manually to a battery charger. More than that, this is an IoT robot. It stays permanently connected to a WiFi network. The user uses a web interface to interact with the mower. All these features have a computer in common called Raspberry Pi.
- 4. MicroCutter
This is probably the smallest robot designed to mow the lawn. It is simple and works autonomously. The two motorized wheels drive the robot in a straight line until it bumps into an obstacle. Once the obstacle is detected, the robot changes the direction and continues to cut the grass.
- 5. Radio Controlled Lawn Mower
I like more this project. It is not sophisticated. The chassis is simple and provide enough space to host the four wheels, motors and a big central unit to cut the grass. The user drives the rover wirelessly via a pistol grip radio with four channels.
- 6. RoMow
Turning manual lawn mower into a fully electric mower machine is a classic case of our series of DIY lawn mowers. RoMow is, as you can guess, a fully converted manual lawn mower operated using a standard RC transmitter.This isn’t something you would like to play with it like a toy. It is a massive mower with two golf cart wheels driven by two DC scooter motors. Simple but efficient 3-axis accelerometers from Adafruit adjust the robot direction when it moves over rising terrain or anything else that change its direction of motion.
