The robot lawn mower – cool fad or here to stay?
The robot lawn mower – lean, mean, and green and will mow your lawn in no time flat! The robot lawn mower is just another recent addition to the rapidly expanding market of home robotics and an indication of how commercial robotics is developing a particular industry around the performance of repetitive tasks. The most notable icon in this industry is iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner robot. But the transfer from the carpet to the yard is made easy by companies such as Friendly Robotics, which sells the Robomow, and Lawnbotts.com —the two major competitors in the robot lawn mower market.
Robomow is a robot lawn mower which comes with a simple but catchy mantra: “It mows. You don’t.” The manufacturer claims that Robomow “can handle any garden that a traditional gas or electric walk mower can handle. Your lawn will always look as if it was just cut, every day,” – the robot lawn mower does a much better job than a traditional mower, while saving up to 25% irrigation and fertilizing costs. The sponsoring company, Friendly Robotics, founded in 1995, describes its philosophy as follows:
“During the course of the last 50 years mankind has automated many of the routine chores at home. Washing machines, dishwashers and dryers are found almost in every home in the western world these days. The next step in this natural evolution is to automate tasks that require motion in the space of the home or the garden, such as cleaning and mowing. A new category of robotics appliances is being developed in order to do this, appliances that are able to move in order to perform their tasks, and avoid objects, pets and people in their way. This emerging new category of appliances is called Home Robotics, and it is expected that in the years to come these machines will become as common in our homes as washing machines are today.”
The second major competitor in the robot lawn mower industry is Lawnbotts.com, headquarted in Birmingham, AL, which sells its robot lawn mower by the same name. The Lawnbott LB3500 Robot Lawn Mower , for example, is claimed to be the top of the line robot lawn mower on the market, and among its impressive set of specs, it can mow lawns at 30 degree slopes. LB3500 has also garnered some nice reviews. According to Engadget: “iRobot may own the market for autonomous indoor cleaning devices, but when it comes to taming that wild jungle you call a backyard, the new king of the hill may well be the LawnBott LB3500.”
Robot Lawn Mower: LawnBott LB3500
While of course much different in purpose and application than advanced humanoid robots, the robot lawn mower and the robot vacuum cleaner both tell us something about the current state of affairs in the development and commercialization of robot devices in the United States, in contrast to Japan, for instance. The contrast in design and intention between products sold by iRobot and Friendly Robotics and the advanced Japanese humanoid robots ASIMO and HRP-4C, describes the significantly different conceptual approaches of both countries to the field of robotics. The pattern among U.S. robotics researchers appears to be very pragmatic, centered on the goal of developing automated machines that focus on a specific task. This could also be characterized as a “bottom-up” approach by which designers start out simple and gradually build more complexity into their machines. Japan, on the other hand, seems to embody a more “top-down” approach as it creates humanoid robots that are highly sophisticated and designed to perform any task that a human can do, even better! On a social and philosophical level this suggests a high degree of respect and reverence for the human body and for the need to create something in its image.
These points will be drawn out in further detail in subsequent posts, but for now . . . welcome to the world of robot lawn mowers!
Tags: consumer robotics, future of robotics, home use robots, robot lawn mower, Zygbotics
