Roomba was developing a system without a boundary wire at some point, but it doesn’t look like they ended up shipping it.
Not sure why nobody else is working on it. Could it be that the ToF sensors in indoor robot vacuums are just not powerful enough to operate in sunlight?
Maybe it’s because the boundary wire installation is a matter of minutes and only needs to be done once?
The boundary wire was not a matter of minutes for me - far from it, more like half a day - but that's because I wanted to bury it out of sight.
I guess they still rely on boundary wire because it's very reliable - you don't want a couple unlucky GPS readings to cause your robot mower, armed with very real spinning blades, to end up in the neighbor's yard or on the street and hurt somebody.
I made the same mistake the first time as well, took forever to get it installed underground by hand. The second time I paid like 100 euros for the full-service package where they showed up with a cable-laying machine and it literally took the guy more time to unload the machine from the van than it took him to circle the property and lay the cable.
The bigger headache with boundary cables is finding and fixing any cuts that might happen when doing unrelated yardwork.
>finding and fixing any cuts that might happen when doing unrelated yardwork
this is also easy if you have decent electronics equipment... or it's built in the mower, itself, where you can select to follow the line till the break.
Not sure why nobody else is working on it. Could it be that the ToF sensors in indoor robot vacuums are just not powerful enough to operate in sunlight?
Maybe it’s because the boundary wire installation is a matter of minutes and only needs to be done once?