
iRobot Terra Robot Lawn Mower – First Impressions - apsec112
https://myrobotmower.com/irobot-terra-robot-lawn-mower/
======
syntaxing
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.

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

~~~
scrooched_moose
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.

~~~
DennisP
Fwiw about a year ago I got the Peanut, a professional plug-in trimmer that
costs $45. It works way better than any battery-powered trimmer I've tried.

Only drawback is that you change the length by replacing the guard instead of
just sliding it to a different position; one day I didn't notice the guard was
off and with one swipe it was too late to salvage my beard. I removed the rest
and started over; luckily I keep it short anyway.

~~~
hanniabu
Corded products are underrated. It's a hassle to deal with the cord, but it's
worth it when not needing to worry about if the battery is charged when you
start, the battery running out mid-task, or plugging in the battery to charge
after and remembering to unplug it later.

The issue with the cord can be greatly improved by having a nice retractible
extension cord. Easy to take out, easy to put back, easy to move, easy to
store.

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adrianmonk
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...](https://media.irobot.com/2019-01-30-iRobot-R-Reinventing-Lawn-Care-
with-Terra-TM-Robot-Mower)

------
ch
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
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.

~~~
cr0sh
> 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"...

~~~
ska
> on the level of precision

This is pretty much set by the width of the mower blades - so not a practical
issue.

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Seenso
> 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.

~~~
defanor
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).

~~~
wolrah
> 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?

~~~
defanor
Mechanical shocks are indeed the concern.

> 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

What is this based on (i.e., are HDDs and all the smaller components commonly
designed to withstand such shocks)?

Now I've looked up a random WD Blue HDD data sheet [1], which mentions 30G
shock (read/write, 2 ms). If a vacuum cleaner was to hit it directly while
moving at about 1 m/s (less than 4 km/h, and it seems to walk at around that
speed, though I haven't found exact values), and assuming that it would
accelerate the HDD to its own speed in those 2 ms (maybe it's not realistic,
though not obvious to me), that'd be about 50G (1 m/s / 0.002 s / 9.8). Even
if it is so, a vacuum cleaner has a plastic bumper, a computer case is heavy,
and a vacuum won't hit any of those components directly, but it seems
dangerously close and I'd rather not hit the computer.

[1] [https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-
library...](https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-
library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-blue-
hdd/data-sheet-wd-blue-pc-hard-drives-2879-771436.pdf)

~~~
marblar
> accelerate the HDD to its own speed in those 2 ms (maybe it's not realistic,
> though not obvious to me)

You need to conserve the momentum and kinetic energy, so assuming an elastic
collision you're going to accelerate the PC to about half the speed of
roomba[1] so you're looking at closer to 25G. With the plastic bumper, you're
not getting anywhere near an elastic collision and your contact time is
probably a lot longer than .002 due to the deflection. I would not worry too
much about this.

[http://www.convertalot.com/elastic_collision_calculator.html](http://www.convertalot.com/elastic_collision_calculator.html)

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ngcc_hk
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
> _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.

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SnowingXIV
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.

~~~
UnFleshedOne
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...](https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-
disaster-1826070720)

~~~
dawnerd
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.

~~~
UnFleshedOne
Watering, weeding and fertilizing is not the only problems -- there is also
intentional lack of biodiversity. Plants native to the area will always
support more.

~~~
dawnerd
Yep, people should use local grasses and clovers. I've let the clover here
take over my back yard and it's been wonderful with attracting bees - plus I
don't have to mow it very often.

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karmicthreat
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
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...

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jpalomaki
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.

~~~
karmicthreat
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.

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

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karmicthreat
Not really, we were using an IMU with a magnetometer and it was reasonably
stable when it was setup correctly. As well as calibrated well. That with the
GPS made things stable enough that it was at least a very good demo.

~~~
jcims
Very cool!

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cr0sh
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...)

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crmrc114
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.

~~~
wolrah
> 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.

~~~
throwlaplace
>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/](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.

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aaron695
Almost a year old, nothing newer?

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

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Tistel
hopefully they can do something like:
[https://www.sawstop.ca/](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
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.

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nimbius
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.

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deedubaya
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
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.

