iRobot Terra Robot Lawn Mower – First Impressions

https://myrobotmower.com/irobot-terra-robot-lawn-mower/

by apsec112 • 7 years ago

79 104 7 years ago

SnowingXIV3• 7 years ago

Has anyone had decent results with these mowers (any brand)? I'm in the process of building a house that's going to have a pretty simple yard and I've considering picking one of these up.

They are also substantially more expensive than the typical electric mowers you push yourself but if it saves x hours per week/month could be worth it. I just don't want to end up with an expensive paperweight and end up having to buy another mower anyways.

UnFleshedOne2• 7 years ago

Consider instead something other than a lawn. They don't call it "green concrete" for nothing.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-disaster...

dawnerd3• 7 years ago

Depends on your climate. In the PNW for example you don't have to water really so having a nice lawn isn't an ecological disaster that the article would make out.

SnowingXIV3• 7 years ago

Not an option. There is an association and this a new development. I'm just looking to for the most affordable and hands free maintenance aside from hiring out a company to do it which I still might do.

cjensen• 7 years ago

That was all based on a "green" news article being recycled on gizmodo. The original article was full of incorrect interpretations of data and so forth. E.g. lawns are not, contrary to the original article, the #1 crop by area.

Lawns in general are green by being carbon sinks. But as with all things, it depends. If you live in the midwest with plenty of summer rain, the lawn costs very little. If you're in Arizona or California, water use is an issue.

acomjean2• 7 years ago

We have a small yard and a Landdroid mower we got 3 years ago. The yard is probably 1000sf It works quite well, though set up involves a perimieter wire which was a pain.

A critter eat through the wire this year, which means the mower stoped working. Figuring it out is was a perimeter wire break and where was a little tricky and involved using an am radio. Generally happy with the device.

efremjw2• 7 years ago

Same problem here! Squirrels have gnawed through my perimeter wire dozens of times. I have the Husqvarna Automower 450x, which allows for three shortcut home wires. Repairing the broken wire is easy...finding the break, however, is extremely difficult and time consuming. I've had the mower for 2 years and it's been awesome in every other way. I'm thinking of pulling up my entire perimeter wire and installing a new wire deeper. No doubt this will make finding future breaks more difficult, but I hope that by being deeper, the squirrel problem will go away.

Qworg• 7 years ago

I used to design and build these - if you have a simple yard, you can use the inexpensive mowers, as long as you don't care about having striping in your lawn. I had one for two seasons, and it was awesome - your lawn looks like it freezes in time and is healthier to boot.

You just have to install an "invisible fence" style wire around the perimeter.

Shivetya• 7 years ago

I look at it this way, if it is a waste of time to mow it then you have too much of it. I have nearly 12k sq feet and I still push mow it. Using an electric mower I find the time both relaxing and I can always use the exercise. plus I use the time to see what I need to fix, tweak, or just change out.

tclancy• 7 years ago

For reference, that's a quarter acre.

Marsymars2• 7 years ago

I switched to a reel mower when my last push mower died, and that's really relaxing without any of the noise or vibration of a gas mower.

It is more physically demanding, but like you said, I can always use the exercise.

bluedino• 7 years ago

It takes me an hour to mow my lawn. Sometimes I can go a month without cutting it, sometimes I have to cut it every 3 days. Depends on the season, amount of rain, etc.

I spend more time doing other crap like weeding, fertilizing, trimming, picking up sticks, etc

alkonaut• 7 years ago

The benefit of the robot that cuts it all the time is a healthier lawn with fewer slugs, dandelions, ticks and other pests. I cut once a week but it only really looks good the first day or two after cutting. And it’s full of slugs and weeds most of the season. So the robot isn’t really just doing the job you do yourself (weekend cut when it’s too long), it’s maintaining it in a way that’s hard to do manually.

woodpanel• 7 years ago

Go get one.

Used to own robo-vacuum cleaners of many brands, eventually sold them all, as each of them caused more work than they were supposed to spare me. After that I was reluctant to get a robomower but it is worth it.

Pros:

- you have to buy machinery anyways (if you're new to having a yard)

- less noise

- it will get mowed more often

- more mows -> healthier lawn

Setup cons:

- you have to bury/hammer a wire into the ground surrounding the area to-be-mowed

- you may have to expand/change your wifi-setup because mower/base-station need access as well

- like with robomowers, decoration is an obstacle. It will either get destoryed or destroy the bot

- because of this, need to have less decoration or need to surround them by wires as well

Recurrent cons:

- obstacles hit can (and will) cause blades to break free

- bc of this I have to replace the blades every 2-3 months (the only real maintenance to be done)

- at least try to find the lost blades (unless you're ok with guests/kids stepping into some unexpected, dirty, rusty, crooked blade

SnowingXIV3• 7 years ago

Exactly why I'm hesitant. The robo-vacuums have been highly disappointing and do a much worse job than taking the few moments to vacuum myself. I still have one that I run constantly because it's slightly better than nothing on a daily basis.

These cons don't seem terrible. Maybe in a few months we'll see some new ones on the market and see prices a bit more competitive. Appreciate all the input.

syntaxing• 7 years ago

By first impressions, I thought this was a hands-on impression. Sad to read that its just reiterating whats been announced a couple months back.

dawnerd3• 7 years ago

And posts like these make it hard to trust any of the "review" sites out there when all they do is rehash press releases.

trevin• 7 years ago

Yeah this is clearly a thin affiliate site churning out content optimized for "robot mowers" and not somebody with any real expertise on the subject.

colejohnson66• 7 years ago

The domain name was a big flag for me that it may not be genuine.

scrooched_moose4• 7 years ago

They admittedly aren't perfect, but Consumer Reports is the only one I remotely trust. So many "review sites" basically just look at the highest rated items on Amazon and create an article out of it. I needed a new beard trimmer recently and it was just page after page of spam.

Amazon reviews are so manipulated they're nearly useless now. Reddit isn't too bad, at least for the most part they are real people.

ajcourtney• 7 years ago

Hi Syntaxing I'm the owner of myrobotmower.com Although not a hands on, I wrote this article due to the significance of the announcement. As a robot lawnmower enthusiast for 20 years, the imminent arrival of robot mowers without perimeter wire is a paradigm shift in the industry. I'm actively involved with a number of companies developing competing products. I have hands on experience with most of the current robot mowers on the market, and robot mowers like the irobot terra are going to make a big impact when they launch. I wish I had more info for the article that I can publicly share. Best wishes Andrew

adrianmonk• 7 years ago

This article doesn't have a date, but it must be at least a little old. It says:

iRobot has finally announced that it will launch the Terra robot lawn mower later in 2019

Looks like iRobot's announcement was January 30, 2019:

https://media.irobot.com/2019-01-30-iRobot-R-Reinventing-Law...

ch• 7 years ago

I feel like they missed a golden opportunity to let users select between various space filling curves for the cut pattern.

I, for one, would love to have my lawn cut in a Hilbert Curve pattern.

shaftway• 7 years ago

Get one of the mowers that follows a wire and then embed the wire under the grass in the pattern you want.

I remember seeing one of these where a guy would mow outside a pattern at one height, then adjust the height of the mower and mow the inside of the pattern so the grass was longer, giving him a noticeable pattern. Can't find a link at the moment though.

Seenso4• 7 years ago

Get one of the mowers that follows a wire and then embed the wire under the grass in the pattern you want.

Isn't it bad for the lawn to mow in a fixed pattern?

cr0sh3• 7 years ago

Get one of the mowers that follows a wire and then embed the wire under the grass in the pattern you want.
Hilbert Curve pattern

OP is going to be outside for a while depending on the level of precision of that particular "pattern"...

m463• 7 years ago

Wouldn't that also be the most efficient pattern possible? No portion of the lawn would ever be cut twice.

On the other hand, hilbert curves seem to have a lot of right-angle corners, which maybe would slow the mower.

Seenso4• 7 years ago

The iRobot Terra will use a series of wireless beacons that you place around your yard instead of a perimeter wire. These will provide a wireless, localized positioning signal to allow the iRobot Terra to find it’s way around your lawn.

What happens when the beacons run out of battery power?

The biggest fear I have with a robot lawnmower is that it somehow escapes its boundary and wanders the neighborhood and injures a person or pet with its spinning blade. And it's pointless to have one if you have to supervise it to safeguard against rare faults in its boundary detection system.

defanor2• 7 years ago

That's my concern about their home vacuum cleaners as well: if a battery runs out, it would hit my computer. There are some programmable models though (were not available here at the time), and various certainly programmable DIY ones (may be a fun project, but would take some time); that seems like a much better solution -- both for efficiency and predictability (as opposed to random walk), and for this particular case with paths/boundaries (define them once in the robot's memory, maybe even just by moving it manually or otherwise showing it the path/boundaries, and don't rely on batteries in external devices).

Seenso4• 7 years ago

I have one of the random Roombas. The virtual walls are nice for keeping the robot out of areas where it will get stuck, but I rely on making small modifications to the environment to protect things from damage.

In the case of a computer, you could try putting it on a short platform (no more than an inch high is sufficient) or positioning it so cables are in spaces narrower than the robot can access. The latter is what I do. The back of the case is a few inches from a wall, and the cables are routed upwards into cable guides mounted under the desk. I mostly did that for aesthetics rather than the Roomba, though.

Izkata• 7 years ago

I have a Neato, which uses magnetic strips for boundaries. No batteries, and in 5-ish years so far, no problems.

wolrah3• 7 years ago

if a battery runs out, it would hit my computer.

So? It's a vacuum, you could drive it right in to a computer non-stop until the battery runs out and it's not going to do any meaningful damage. The worst case scenario would be if you had a case where the power or reset button was right there at vacuum height, but other than that what's your concern?

asdff3• 7 years ago

I have the xiaomi one with lidar that actually maps the room and vacuums in laps. If it detects something in the way it slows down and lightly taps it, then it turns around. It never hits anything full speed. If you disconnect the dock the vacuum will keep working, but when it is finished it will go looking for the dock then tell you it's lost.

karmicthreat6• 7 years ago

I would trust the beacons a bit more. You could at least test on the mower that you have a good enough beacon constellation.

rtkwe• 7 years ago

If enough beacons have died such that it can no longer calculate it's position I bet it just stops. Should be a fairly easy thing to check just stop, send a notification, and power off or more likely since beacons are far more likely to die between runs just don't start if enough beacons aren't present.

elif• 7 years ago

You only need 3 to localize.

So you can have a constellation of n, resulting in a battery failure tolerance rate of (n-3) / n %.

If you are worried, increase n.

hanniabu3• 7 years ago

And you will 100% be reliable instead of the company. This is my fear with fully autonomous cars too. If the car has an error can injures someone, their huge team of lawyers and lobbyists will likely pin the blame on you somehow.

thereisnospork• 7 years ago

Well if you assume a full automonous car is as safe a driver (on average) as a 16 year old male that liability you are worried about can be (will be legislatively required to be?) insured away for a few hundred dollars a month.

The insurance market for lawnmower liability admittedly isn't as well developed.

reaperducer• 7 years ago

What happens when the beacons run out of battery power?

FWIW, the indoor beacons for its Roomba machines last a very long time. Mine go four to six months on a pair of AA batteries. Since these new ones are for outside, I hope they have larger batteries and last even longer.

jjeaff2• 7 years ago

They could probably easily make them work with solar chargers like those little walkway lights.

dzhiurgis• 7 years ago

You'd have to try really hard to get injured by this. Blades are covered and stop when it tips over or get's lifted up.

So unless you are a deaf gecko pet, I don't see much of a problem... But it's an American forum and this is not a legal advice.

Tistel• 7 years ago

hopefully they can do something like: https://www.sawstop.ca/ to be safer. or maybe the moisture in the grass might send false positives making it not possible. i just fear an old blind/deaf dog getting hurt (or passed out frat boy).

ericlewis• 7 years ago

Off topic, but kind of funny the first thing you see when opening that is someone missing a finger. I’d think you would want to demonstrate off the bat your product means you keep all 10.

deedubaya• 7 years ago

I absolutely hate my iRobot vacuum. Constantly getting stuck and does a poor job of actually vacuuming. Not to mention the wireless beacons it requires cost ~1/3 the cost of the actual unit.

xiphias2• 7 years ago

Just buy a Xiaomi vacuum. Half the price, and no wireless beacons needed to be usable.

It gets stuck as well by default, but I set up a lot of red zones on the app and now it finishes perfectly almost every time.

MBCook2• 7 years ago

What wireless beacons? Do you mean the lighthouses that mark ‘no go’ zones?

For the record I’m quite happy with mine.

moduspol• 7 years ago

I have the new Roomba (i7) and you can use the app to draw boxes on your floor layout to tell it not to go places.

This is good for me because I try to avoid things that need batteries that must be changed.

jpalomaki• 7 years ago

They mention GPS is not accurate enough and thus different solution is needed.

Could you do local differential-GPS solution? Put the ”base station” to charging base (which likely remains static) and transmit the correction information over wifi or using some unlicensed frequency.

karmicthreat6• 7 years ago

It could work and that plus an IMU is what we were doing at my now recently defunct lawnmower startup. For us to have the precision we needed we had about a 3500$ setup to do so.

jcims2• 7 years ago

Didn't all the jostling of driving over terrain mess with the IMU?

nullc• 7 years ago

You really want a carrier-phase-tracking L1+L2 receiver on each end for that sort of usage which isn't inexpensive (yet).

The beacons also could be adopted by future indoor projects of theirs... that would be really nice. My roomba gets lost easily when it starts getting dark out.

musingsole• 7 years ago

Combine with an outdoor surveillance system and use the cameras to track and correct the mower's position.

karmicthreat6• 7 years ago

I had considered just some ir lights on the ground and on the mower. Then have a drone hover over the lawn and process the video for positioning.

crmrc114• 7 years ago

I fail to understand how a combination of GPS and Machine vision could not overcome the need for a dedicated telemetry system.

I mean yeah if you don't want to build a machine vision system to handle this I guess.... But my John Deere hardware has GPS support for crops and the accuracy is pretty damn spot on.

throwlaplace2• 7 years ago

your john deere also costs 10x (100x?). accurate gps isn't cheap. here's one of the cheapest chips that gets cm accuracy

https://www.swiftnav.com/store/gnss-sensor-volume-orders/pik...

add >$500 to their BOM is probably something they want to avoid

karmicthreat6• 7 years ago

The ublox zed-f9p is probably the most cost effective right now at 200$

wolrah3• 7 years ago

But my John Deere hardware has GPS support for crops and the accuracy is pretty damn spot on.

To get that level of accuracy they're using differential GPS where another fairly expensive device is placed at a known location and transmits a signal indicating the amount and direction of the error in the signal received from the satellites. The receiver on the tractor then uses this information to correct the signal and get much greater accuracy than would otherwise be available.

This is not available in consumer-grade receivers.

throwlaplace2• 7 years ago

This is not available in consumer-grade receivers.

not true. i posted a link in a sibling comment but you can use two piksis with one as the base and one as the rover to get sub cm differential rtk. you can also use NOAA CORS station (if you're within 10km) to get precise ppk

https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/CORS/

for this use case i would set the base down at a fixed location and let it solve. then i would wait a day for CORS data to get accurate gps for the base and plan out my trajectories relative to that base (using whatever registered maps they use). alternatively you could survey the location where the base sits.

nimbius• 7 years ago

spoiler: robot lawnmowers have been around for 20 years. they're somewhat popular in Europe. Ireland has robotmow, and Colorado based bigmow has a lawnmower thats almost as wide as a human is tall.

One of the key features of the iRobot Terra is that it will not use a perimeter wire to mark the boundary of the lawn.

So the Terra is short for Terra-fying I take it. We havent even built an autonomous automobile that doesnt occasionally mow down an errant jay-walker, yet somehow a bladed autonomous vehicle is going to be safer? At least with Robotmow and competitors you have boundaries. You can run or crawl to safety if there were to be an accident. Nothing in the review seems to indicate theres even the potential for this device to detect a human presence. and a smartphone app? One good hack, and you now have a lawnmower that drives into a pool full of children, or a lawnmower that persistence hunts pets to exhaustion and turns them into gulash while youre at work.

cr0sh3• 7 years ago

This is pretty neat; I had the impression that they were going to make something like this, but kinda put it out of my mind after hearing nothing about it for years.

I found an old Friendly Robotics lawn mower robot on Craigslist and purchased it for $50, thinking of using it for my lawn but I never got around to doing anything with it. Mainly because I couldn't think of an easy way to detect the perimeter of the lawn without an edge wire!

I guess it's not an easy problem to solve.

I had considered a bunch of options, a few of the ideas I had were:

1. Some kind of camera or color sensor, looking downward, to detect "green" vs "non-green" - assuming the grass was green and non-grass would be some other color. That would work ok for most of my yard, but my lawn in front doesn't have an "edge" with the neighbor's lawn - so it would mow their lawn, too - not what I want.

2. A passive perimeter, consisting of a bunch of spaced (maybe 6" between?) magnets - I thought maybe plastic golf tees with a rare-earth magnet glued on top would be ok; then use hall-effect sensors on the robot's perimeter to determine if it had crossed over the line of magnets.

3. This one was more to detect cut vs uncut grass - but use some kind of humidity sensor; assuming cut grass has higher humidity than uncut grass, "sniff" the ground and avoid uncut (drier) areas. The problem with this concept, mainly, was in not being able to find high-speed humidity sensors/detectors.

At any rate, I never followed through with any of this, but maybe someday I might return to it? I am curious on the cost of this iRobot lawn mower, though. I'm guessing 4 figures, given what I know about the price of their vacuums (which my wife loves; every time one dies, she buys a new one, and the old one I save for my future Roomba army to take over the world with).

If my guess is accurate, then I'll just have to put off buying one, as it will still be cheaper to continue to pay my landscaper to cut my lawn (and this robot won't trim trees or bushes yet, so...)

karmicthreat6• 7 years ago

It’s a good call for iRobot to skip GPS. You can get 1-2cm precision. But not always and it can be hard to tell when you are off. Plus the equipment is still not inexpensive in a consumer product context.

I think if I were to do it over (my lawnmower startup blew up) I’d do something like this and just drive the beacon cost down as much as possible. I had looked at using the DW1000 but the rest of the team wanted something beaconless for commercial applications.

foobarian• 7 years ago

I'm not a fan of beacons. If I built this for myself I'd probably stick a calibrated camera or two somewhere and use that for localization. Some day...

aaron695• 7 years ago

Almost a year old, nothing newer?

<meta property="article:published_time" content="2019-01-30T22:15:19+00:00" />

ngcc_hk• 7 years ago

I actually have a few cows of different colours coming to my patch to do the mower. My review of them is that they do the job and so far no residue. Just wonder in the old days there is a buffalo. May be my opening is too small for him or is it her (got horns though). Just to ensure they do not sit down as settle down in front of my house is not a good development for my places.

It is real. I am not joking.

catalogia• 7 years ago

so far no residue

I think your cows might be constipated. ;)

Incidentally I've heard of farmers renting out goats to mow difficult terrain, particularly on steep hills next to roads.

seltzered_• 7 years ago

You might like this Gregory Bateson excerpt about the relationship between horses and grass, and how suburbanites pursue mechanical replacements of such relationships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW3ovmBjQ9I&feature=youtu.be...

Honestly hoping I never have a lawn, or pull off some forestry / silvopasture living.

iRobot Terra Robot Lawn Mower – First Impressions

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