Originally published at: With the MowRo robot lawn mower, you'll never have to cut the grass yourself ever again | Boing Boing
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It looks like a TRON mower.
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Let me know when they make one with a 48" mowing deck.
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I started my gas mower for the first time this Spring and it blew so much smoke a neighbor came over to see if everything was alright.
Electric? 
Robot?
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The picture in the article is of an older model Worx Landroid.
I have one of those and they’re not bad. Mine is about 5 years old and I noticed the battery getting weak last fall. It was having to recharge much more frequently. I’ll need a new battery this year.
Things to keep in mind with a robot lawnmower:
- Most won’t operate outside the area bounded by the guide-wire.
- You stake down the guide-wire which runs in a loop beginning and ending at the charging-dock.
- They are about RC car loudness (but they beep if they get stuck) so they can run almost any time.
- They mow randomly over a fixed distance, so they need to mow a lot to keep the grass looking even. M-F with weekends off is typical. They are intended to make lots of little trims, not hack away at really tall grass. You are usually instructed to make the first mow of the season with a traditional mower, although I’ve never needed to.
- Plug in the charging-dock somewhere you can can see it from inside the house! (see below)
- You need to check on it every day it mows - They are prone to getting stuck on larger sticks, molehills, holes, and sometimes even on their own dock. Nothing like forgetting to check for a few days and finding the grass getting taller and the mower partly docked with a dead battery.
- They are terrible at mulching leaves, mostly leaving them untouched.
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The pleasure of convenience would be replaced with the worry of it getting stolen while unattended.
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MowRo? I guess that Mowbot got to the good name first. How about Patrick Mower?
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Battle it out with the neighbor, and de-rez them!
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Lawns are poison. Kill your lawn.
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Then what do I do with an acre of mud?
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This is my biggest irritants with robot mowers is the guide wire design. It feels like the early Roomba’s. I have an acre, so I’m willing to spend more on an AI mower, but I’m not going to do that until someone shows me some actual AI. I have a Neato robot vac and it works great. I feel like in another 5 years I should be able to have that outside.
Also a 100Wh battery seems rather weak by today’s standards. My weed eater has a +160Wh battery.
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Wildflower ‘meadow’.
You can ‘kill’ it by letting it grow and mowing very late in the season. Or sow yellow rattle to see off the grass and then sow wildflowers.
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Do they get time-and-a-half on holidays?
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The guide wire is a pain. I buried mine, because the stakes would pop up in winter and once the wire even broke. Even now I need to go re-bury some of it each spring.
I wish the battery was a bit bigger, yes. But keep in mind that the mower doesn’t weigh much, is only meant to cut the tips of the grass, and will go back and charge when needed and then automatically resume mowing when charged. Still, I wouldn’t recommend one for anyone with larger than 1/2 an acre (and that’s pushing it really if you are cutting the entire lot).
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Good news!
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Whenever I hear about robotic lawn mowers I think of the bit from the 1962 Jerry Lewis movie It’s Only Money in which the main character is pursued by a bunch of robotic landscaping machines that have been reprogrammed to kill him.
It was played for laughs but when I saw that movie on TV as a kid it was the closest thing I’d ever seen to The Terminator: terrifying, unstoppable machines that could even grind their way through solid stonework trying to get to their target.
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Nice. Now that could be a game changer.
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I’m pretty sure Mark Walberg watched that play out in an M. Night Shyamalan movie, or at least a mower running over someone.
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An autonomous robot with whirring blades loose in my yard? NO THANKS.
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I mean, that’s pretty damn terrifying. It reminds me of the robot dog from Fahrenheit 451 (or Snow Crash for that matter). Did they really need to leave the blades exposed?
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