That looks awesome! Here's a comment I wrote earlier about the topic:
I've been thinking about a suite of robots on the residential level that could not only mow the grass and edge it, but also shovel snow, and perhaps eventually prune plants and pick the harvest. If a base, plus a suite of attachments, could be affordable at less than $5k retail, I would buy it.
Awesome! That price might be hard to achieve any time soon. Mostly because the engineering team will be very expensive, so the price will have to be many multiples of the unit cost for some time. Such a thing might be possible at a $20k price in five to ten years, and a service company could offer that work on contract to many different households.
As robotics matures as a field, the engineering costs to accomplish this will go down, as will per unit costs. Maybe in 20 years time such a multi bot could be available. It’s hard to predict the future and probably of questionable merit. That said I’ve become much more pessimistic about timelines for robotics as I’ve continued to work in the industry.
My hope though is that open source robotics can keep pace with the industry as time goes on, just as open source operating systems have kept pace with their closed source counterparts. That way people will have options when the technology does become feasible.
Why, in particular have you become more pessimistic about the timelines for robotics? I've also been headed this way, but it's as a complete outsider of the field simply extrapolating directionality comparing promises to deliverables with the former exponentially outpacing the seemingly linear, at best, progress of the latter. Interestingly the same is also true of many other fields from genetics, to AI, to molecular nanotechnology. The latter being a radical example of something going from 'the next big thing to revolutionize society' to all but disappearing in a period of < 10 years.
About $1500 including batteries. $400 of that is motor controllers, which could be reduced to $130 using Odrive instead of VESC for motor controllers. This is for the remote control version. If you want it self driving, consider the cost of a beefy mobile computer and sensors. I am currently working on a reinforcement learning system that will use cameras and the $1300 NVIDIA Jetson Xavier computer for autonomy.
Oh I know. I have a food forest, and aquaponics system, and some fence gardens. But I can't get rid of the grass (yet) because of the HOA (I did plant clover in it).
I'm just saying this would be a good space to start, if the robotics dev economics made sense: the market is there.
Nice how it is always other people's things that are silly. Lawns are silly in places like Las Vegas, but maybe not particularly silly in a place like Michigan or New Jersey.
My parents' NJ lawn needs a lot of maintenance -- they use a lawn service that mows the law every 7 - 10 days, fertilizes a few times a year, maintains the sprinklers, does some kind of regular weed control, and took care of a mole problem last summer.
Laws might seem to need a lot of maintenance, but unless you live in a desert and have the native vegetation that hardly grows(cactus, yucca, and mesquite like bushes), any landscaping besides a field of rocks will likely require more maintenance.
You could let your yard go back to the wild and that would be cool by me, but where I live people who replace their lawn go with mix of bushes, flowers, and trees with paths and other landscape features that require a lot more man hours in pruning, trimming, leafblowing, etc to keep looking good.
I don't live in the dessert, during the drought a couple years ago, our HOA replaced the lawn areas with some sort of low maintenance native bushes and flowers along with some sort of native grass that doesn't need to be cut.
So now instead of a weekly visit by a landscape crew of 3 to cut and maintain the lawn, we have a bi-weekly visit by a single person to do some light weeding and raking.
If you do it right, it can work out well. I just don't seem to see that in the East Bay where I live. I do my own gardening and cutting grass is easy. Pruning bushes and shrubs is a lot more time consuming per square foot in my experience but I would only mow once a month.
Yeah, I mean, in CT ours grew whether we wanted it or not. the choice was grass or trees, and its not great when trees grow literally right up to your house. if you wanted a buffer it either had to paved, gravel, or grass.
I've been thinking about a suite of robots on the residential level that could not only mow the grass and edge it, but also shovel snow, and perhaps eventually prune plants and pick the harvest. If a base, plus a suite of attachments, could be affordable at less than $5k retail, I would buy it.