Home-made robot lawn mower. Barbie Jeep + control system + blades & motors. Uses buried wire (electronic dog fence), bumpers, and flaps for navigation. Biased random steering.
Transcript:
So here’s the world famous pink and green lawn mower. Pink for these wheels — this thing started out life as a Barbie Jeep — and green for this battery — doesn’t use any gas. It’s, uh, got little bumpers…I’ll show you how those things work. It’s got little flaps…coated with aluminum so that when they touch, the mower knows it’s hit something. It’s got a little control system — a *really* little control system: couple of NAND gates, couple of timers, some relays, stuff like that. And that’s the basic mower that just responds to the bumpers and the flaps.
But it’s also got — I don’t know if you can see it — some coils down here that listen to my electronic dog fence, and a circuit I got off the internet that reads those guys, and treats them just like the bumpers or the flaps, so whenever it hits something it goes in the other direction, until it hits
something and then it goes in the other direction. So…
Let me turn it over, and take a look at the cutters. There’s three motors with little plastic wheels [disks] on them, little razor blades attached to the wheels [disks], and that’s it for the cutting.
There you can see the…what I salvaged from the Barbie Jeep, the motors and the wheels and the chassis.
It’s got an independent suspension, so it doesn’t get hung up too much. Here I’ll show you how that works. I don’t know if you can see it. Anyway, without this it gets stuck all the time.
So, that’s, that’s the mower. Let me plug it in [connect it to the battery] and turn it on.
Oh, and one more thing I didn’t show you…the steering. Steering is mostly random; it’s not controlled. But there is this little scrubber here, so that when the mower’s going forwards, it tries to turn the wheel to the right; When the mower’s going backwards, it tries to turn the wheel to the left, so it doesn’t go back and forth over the same path all the time.
All right let me turn it on.
[Music: “Guinea Pig’s Quest”]
[Music: “Waltz of the Toddlers”]
Oh, it runs like this for about an hour. Maybe an hour and a half. Gets most of the grass in this yard. But, you know, it leaves a little bit. I don’t care about that. Eventually it gets it all. This yard hasn’t been cut by anything else for about a year, so you can see eventually it gets it all. But it doesn’t get the edges at all. You gotta do that with a lawn mower. I’m not going to worry about that.
, https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zuXqg4q3cQ8/hqdefault.jpg
source
It is cutting great ???
I gotta say, it's so refreshing to see a real bare bones automation like this. Don't get me wrong, as an industrial automation designer,I use mcu's every day, but you just can't beat a good mechanical, minimally electronIc control automation. Well done, sir.
Is there a way you can link your control/circuit design or explain? Awesome work
This mower is great!>>>t.co/VpkAk77vpB It's super quiet and discrete, so we actually run it at night sometimes. It's not always the most satisfying to watch, since it uses a random pattern and only cuts a small swath at a time, but it's very effective over time.
Excellent work , if you can have more detail as diagram, items need for buildings it, I would like to build one as yours .
Thanks for video
not bad, very simple, and efective for backyard but cannot cut medium and large areas without fence
can you give me the circuit diagram and the list of materials used in this project sir? And also, how does the vehicle avoid obstacle?
I purchased spare geared motor for a Hummer kids jeep. I use arduino to give it more Logic. Nice mower. Just paint the pink black ?
Why is it that the barbie jeep moes straighter lines then i do?
very good and how is it doing today
You should check out Arduino. It's open source hardware and software. Mostly used for automation projects like this.. A base board costs about 40 to 50 bucks US.
Nice! I am going to try to make a small, light robo mower that uses a GPS shield to follow a path around the yard. Trying to figure out nice light blades. Might take your idea of box cutter blades if i don't find anything better
Hi there, I am very keen to find the circuit you used to make this robot's control system. I want to build a lawnmowing robot also using electronic fence and based on a child's ride-on. Eventually I have some sophisticated ideas for controlling it but I want to make something that works fast to start with. So can you post a link to the circuit you used please?
Love the wiring
This is actually not very far from how the off the shelf lawnmowers are built. The blades needs to be stainless since otherwise they would rust.
what hapens when your dog takes a shit on the lorn it must get pritty messy
Awesome mower! I'm working on something too, but cutting the grass not slashing and solar powered with lithium 18650 batteries. The only thing I am stuck on is navigation because my lawn is not a square but shaped in a way that would mean that this type of setup would leave a lot of lawn not done.
Nice job with the parts you used man. I'm impressed i'm also in the process of making one myself. Except, i'm using wheel chair parts.
That is awesome. The world needs more people tinkering with ideas like you.
What did you use for the cutter blade motors. At what RPM are they turning???
I'm impressed. Good work. You could add a few features, perhaps, that have been mentioned, but overall its a good start at something that could possibly be incredibly precise, eventually. My hats off to you for your innovation. How much better it would be if kids did things like this these days, rather than play endless computer games.
I love how it's something new on Vsauce while we in the Netherlands have had these things as far as I can remember.
This is brilliant wow .wut if you fed it some kind of floor plan so it knows your back yard and all obstacles and would know not to repeat a particular route ..just an idea very very kool , I love to show my kids stuff liked this, wut do you do as a profession