Where are my robot lawn mower? The Roomba maker now has an answer

Robotic vacuum has now existed long enough that you might see a bump around the living room and think, why is it not a robot that can cut my lawn? Turns out, there is no shortage of trying.

For more than a decade, Irobot, the company behind the Roomba vacuumbot, has been working – and working – with robotic lawnmowers. Now it finally has something to show for the effort, even if it comes at a price.

"Frankly, this robot drove me madness," said iRobot's CEO Colin Angle after showing Terra, the company's long-awaited first lawnmower. "It's been an obsession."

The square autonomous lawnmower that Angle's company presented Wednesday was due to a lengthy engineering battle that included death experiments and a conflict with radio astronomers.

Angle and his colleagues have been fielding the question, "So when are you going to cut my lawn?" Since the company began selling Roombas in 2002, however, it was more difficult to learn a robot to navigate in a typical American garden without destroying its flower beds. "There was a lot of despair and frustration on the journey," Angle said.

Engineers threw all the technologies and mechanical designs they could into the secret project, as they hid behind tall, opaque fences next to a highway just outside the Massachusetts Robots headquarters. The test plenum included a picnic table and other obstacles.

The first problem was to help the robot identify the location so that it would not get lost and miss spots. Satellite-based GPS technology didn't do the trick; It was too "fine" because disturbances from tree branches or nearby houses could make it useless, Angle said.

Also ineffective was the sophisticated data vision that drives the latest Roombas. The technology didn't work well because camera lenses can be blocked by blades or dirt, and machine alarm algorithms get confused when the mower comes up and down. Laser Range finders and ground-based beacons presented various challenges.

The company made so many attempts that several early lawnbot prototypes can be seen in the 2008 heist movie "21[ads1]." They look at a scene where Angle plays a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and announces the winner of a robotics competition. The current Terra looks nothing like the prototypes.

"We had given up," Angle said about the project. "We probably gave up twice."

Anyway, financial pressure on the robot increased to diversify product range efforts. (After turning off its defense robot division in 2016, iRobot is almost exclusively a vacuum cleaner seller. The main exception is Braava robot mop, which accounts for a fraction of total revenue.)

Robot lawn mowers also began to spread Europe, where they are now around $ 300 million. However, these robotic mowers require homeowners to set up a perimeter of boundary wires to keep the machines in a restricted area.

Angle said it works well in Germany, where backyards are usually small, flat and rectangular, but not in the meandering lawns of the United States. American green culture also sets a higher bar for what a cut should look like: straight, back and forth lines are appreciated, he said.

Finally, the company found its answer in a radio technology based on "ultra-wide" bandwidths that will guide lawn mowers using beacons located around the lawn, combined with the map storage memory that iRobot already uses for vacuum cleaner. But that idea was avoul by astronomers who said the radio signals could interfere with their interstellar chemistry studies.

Finally, the IRobot got permission from the Federal Communication Commission to use ultra-wide bandwidth for wireless robotic lawnmowers – but not before Harvey Liszt, spectrum manager of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, claimed to the FCC that "there is already a competitive market for robotic lawn mowers using wire loops, which somehow have failed to stop the flow of terrible accidents and played gasoline that iRobot associates with the everyday trainer with the lawn. "

The quiet, electric powerful mower sports a pair of tri-blade mulchers that are meant to work slowly on a lawn – instead of the typical once a week with a mower, it can maneuver around a lawn daily or sometimes a week – and return to the station when it is finished. Users can schedule the machine with a phone app; If it goes down on juice as you move it, it returns to the dock to recharge and then continue where it left off. Along with radio technology, it has a number of other sensors to avoid tin balls and other unexpected debris.

The robot will first start in Germany, where iRobot hopes to capitalize on an existing market where perimeter-based models made by Husqvarna, Bosch and other companies are already popular. The mowers will be on sale in the United States by 2020 following an invitation sentence beta launch later this year.

Forrester Consumer Technology Analyst Frank Gillett said iRobot seems to have solved some of the technical difficulties of self-directed mowing to US lawn culture standards, but he is still skeptical about the fact that there is enough demand among US homeowners, many of whom are either proud of their press. -work or willing to pay someone else to do so.

"The bigger problem is still the cost," Gillett said. . The company has not yet revealed Terra's probable price, but existing high-end robotic mowers can run well over $ 1,000.