It's probably cheaper to hire a landscape maintenance company, or a neighborhood teenager.
Then don't! If it's autonomous it can be out there all the time rather than once a week/whatever, no spinning blade needed. Plan B? Buy a goat.
Nah. What we really want and need is a robot that while it mows the lawn, turns it into: its entire energy source, its entire pool of building blocks for daily (nightly?) self-repairs, for reproduction, for producing oh maybe fluffy warm wool and delicious milk/cheese/butter as a side product, and fertilizes the land from the occasional .. discharge resulting from perpetual energy production-consumption and internal cleanups/repairs, finally as it still does wear down as all physical assemblages are wont to with time, it leaves behind highly durable inputs for sturdy clothing and stylish home decoration (horns, hides, leather etc)!
All from a friggin lawn.
Roboruminant 2.0 baby. Need to reinvent mammalian evolution before we can really reinvent the wheel!
I'd call that safe enough to operate unsupervised in an enclosed yard.
And if in doubt, just wear under-armour instead..
I've heard good things about the Husqvarna 450 especially.
Spoiler alert: there is no computer vision involved, still works perfectly even for large lawns; our local university even uses them in campus parks.
http://www.superhouse.tv/19-husqvarna-automower-basics/
http://www.superhouse.tv/superhouse-vlog-47-husqvarna-automo...
http://www.superhouse.tv/superhouse-vlog-48-pausing-the-husq...
http://www.superhouse.tv/superhouse-vlog-49-automower-securi...
http://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/robotic-lawn-mowers/
http://www.deere.com/en_INT/products/equipment/robotic_mower...?
http://www.honda.co.uk/lawn-and-garden/products/miimo-2015/o...
Donkey: a self driving library and control platform for small scale DIY vehicles
"What do you want?"
"Coffee."
"I CAN'T HEAR YOU! I SAID WHAT DO YOU WANT?!"
"Give me coffee or I will end you."
This is not what I expected when I read your comment. I was expecting a platform where you upload the parameters of a hardware system, the platform digitizes that system into a virtual sandbox, and people can then write arbitrary programs for that system and showcase them in the sandbox, where the uploader can buy, comment, and rate those programs. Something along the lines of https://openai.com/blog/
I'm working on the next version to make it more useful, but all the technology is not there yet, I want the robot to be able to understand speech and talk back to users. I also want the robot to be able to play games with people. I think the platform has a lot of potential. I want Google to release a low power tensor processing unit made for the pi to make this more useful. This will open up a lot of doors for robot and AI enthusiasts. I'm looking to turn this into a platform, contact me if this is of interest to you.