I still mow my own lawn. My father beat me into taking over this chore when I was 12, so naturally I wanted to pass along the feeling of "a job well done" to my son. Cleverly, he screwed it up so bad I had to start doing it again. In a genius move, he ran over a garden hose which coiled around the blade and had to be chipped off.
But now, those days of having to go out and mow on a 90 degree day may be over. Massachusetts based iRobot today introduced the Terra robot lawn mower , which features “state-of-the-art mapping and navigation technologies, high-performance, high-quality mowing, and easy installation.”
After conquering vacuuming a floor with Roomba, they worked for over a decade to perfect a robotic lawn mower. " Honestly, this robot drove me insane," said iRobot CEO Colin Angle after showing off Terra , the company's long-awaited first lawn mower. "It has been an obsession."
After several failures, they finally found the answer by using a radio technology based on "ultra-wide" bandwidths that would guide the mowers with the help of beacons situated around the lawn, combined with the map-making memory that iRobot already uses for its vacuums.
You can schedule your mowing with an app, and they say it's so quiet you could even have it mow at night!
Terra gets it's debut in Germany, but it should be gracing American lawns in 2020. Check it out...