It's one thing if your vacuum sucks up a kid's toy, or harasses your cat. Imagine the potential liability if your robotic lawn mower left your yard and entered your neighbors.

Apparently animals will run away and sprinkler heads can be marked with perimeter wire so that the gadget avoids them.

http://www.stiga.com/products/stiga_en/robot-mowers.html

This actually seems solvable by robotics, but it's not a viable solution for beacons or markers as they are meant to be "passed over" by lawn mowers.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/13/irobot-is-working-on-a-robo...

"iRobot: “Use of the iRobotRLM [robot lawn mower] will increase lawn mower safety. An estimated 1,517 lethal accidents occurred with lawn mowers through the years 1997 to 2010. It is reasonable to assume that many of these injuries and deaths would not occur if consumers used a robotic mower. More than 17 million gallons of fuel, mostly gasoline, are spilled each year while refueling lawn equipment. Abattery poweredRLM will reduce emissions, gasoline spills, fires and other such accidents.”NRAO: “iRobot cited multiple statistics of grim accidents and spilt gasoline to assert the public benefit of approving its wireless robotic lawn mowers. However, there is already a competitive market for robotic lawn mowers using wire loops [buried edge wire], which has somehow failed to stanch the stream of ghastly accidents and spilt gasoline that iRobot associates with the mundane practice of lawn-mowing.”"

"An estimated 1,517 lethal accidents occurred with lawn mowers through the years 1997 to 2010."

No data on the "1,517 lethal accidents" to prove that they were caused by fires or anything that a robotic vacuum solves (although I'd be happy to be sent a link proving this). So it's not "reasonable" to assume that these injuries will be reduced - the icing on the cake is the last sentence which essentially contradicts the first...

"there is already a competitive market for robotic lawn mowers using wire loops [buried edge wire], which has somehow failed to stanch the stream of ghastly accidents and spilt gasoline that iRobot associates with the mundane practice of lawn-mowing"

Edit: Just realized the fist statement (claiming safety) is by iRoomba, the second statement (disputing this) is by the NRAO.

So iRoomba (the one selling the product) claims it will reduce vacuums. The NRAO pointed out that despite a "competitive market" for robotic lawn mowers injuries have not been reduced.

Edit 2: Data! http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16361919

Why can't we have a robot that maps the surface and then cleans accordingly? I always get irritated when I look at my Roomba doing it's job.

Disclaimer: I worked on it.

Edit: To answer your question directly, you have 3 choices:

1. Don't map (or somewhat guess it) - Roomba.

2. Map first, then clean - Neato.

3. Map as you clean - Dyson 360 Eye.

This is obviously a crude explanation but they get harder going down the list. If you are interested to know more, read up on SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) algorithms.

Edit: thanks, you answered while I was asking. That's a very interesting use case for SLAM. Does it re-map every use (i.e. today there's toys on the floor, but tomorrow there's not)? Does it store the point cloud or convert it to something more manageable? Are you licensing someone's SLAM library or did you roll your own?

Sorry!

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/images/images_2/jenny/roomb...

I tried a Neato but it was much more prone to getting stuck (every single time actually). Obviously that will vary depending on your furniture.

The answer is of course "it depends." Certainly the Roomba could be smarter, faster, and more efficient, but the question is how much more are customers willing to pay for those.

TL;DR (from the seventh and last paragraph) — "The frequency band proposed for the lawnbot (6240-6740 MHz) is the very same one several enormous radio telescopes operate on."

The writer's goal/task was probably something like "create content" in the broad sense.

My personal opinion: please keep doing what you learned in journalism school :)

Yeah, in the so-called "content marketing" sense of the word, i.e. create whatever random stuff that will get people interested enough that we can monetize them (or get paid by whoever hired us to do the content marketing).

Source: I interact personally with content marketers on a daily basis.

Still, I would have put the key info from the seventh paragraph into the first, e.g.:

"WHO CAN HATE a Roomba? Astronomers, that’s who, because the latest models in the domestic robot family interfere with the radio frequencies used by major astronomical observatories..."

The trend of people paving over their front gardens for car parking is causing a lot of flooding problems in the UK (because water runs straight off concrete, and isn't absorbed). It also makes the general environment much less pleasant and human if everything surrounding roads is paved as far as the eye can see, rather than filled with gardens, whether they're wild or highly tended. You end up with these grim concrete tunnels of development where no one wants to spend their time. That in turn damages pedestrian culture, and the health and social benefits which go with it.

In places where grass is hard to grow (Southwestern US) you see a lot of rock varieties and other materials that they substitute for grass and it looks great.

Just Google, "las vegas yards" and look at the image search.

The last place I lived, my neighbor was tired of his grass in his bakyard (about a 1/4 acre) so he created a huge concrete terrace in his back yard, along with a large rubber hard court for basketball and other activities for his and the neighborhood kids. He still kept his small front yard grass, but the entire backyard was now completely utilitarian.

Not sure where the last place you lived was, but I hope that if it were the desert, that there's some sort of aesthetically pleasing option that exists between a water hungry green grass lawn, and an asphalt or impervious concrete surface. Even if it's not the desert, permeable paving sounds like a win-win solution for aesthetics, functionality, and environmental impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permeable_paving

Either way, it looked really nice and had me thinking about the maintenance and costs of my yard.

Seriously, lawns, like other parts of gardens, are something that people do for hobby - they like the work. Yes, it is somewhat contradictory that then people also want to avoid the chores of mowing. A rock garden may be better but anything will need maintenance work to look neat.

You can have a space filled with vegetables, fruits, shrubs etc.

I don't water my grass, and it isn't as pretty as some people's yards; but it is perfectly fine for playing in; and looks decent enough.

The whole "sprinkler systems are bad" argument doesn't hold much water in suburban NY.

Isn't that the entire point of my post? That different people value things differently? You may see it as "little return", but other people may not.

There are environmental issues with lawns in some locations. I don't suggest having a lawn in the desert. There are a ton of areas throughout the US where having a lawn is just fine, and is environmentally neutral.

Also, you make it sound like the government is paying for people to cut their yards. People do it themselves out of their own free will.

In many places in the US, you are legally required to keep your lawn below a certain height, and not just in HOA neighborhoods, it is often enforced by the city.

the only way to get them to work is to dig a trench along the perimeter of a lawn and install a wire that creates the electronic fence needed to ensure the automaton don’t wander beyond the property line.

If they really want to implement that method, shopping cart locking systems have done it before, and they don't need 6GHz+ RF:

http://www.wired.com/2007/07/hack-remote-sho/

Having said that, radio interference is taken pretty seriously (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Qu...). The free-for-all that we're familiar with is really just a few tiny consumer bands.

DGPS seems like a better idea (even easier to install a virtual border by manually driving the robot around the edge), but would probably require some above-surface beacons. I'd imagine iRobot is trying to cater to the type of people who think grass needs to be mowed every week and wouldn't want even a few beacons sticking up.

Still I'm sure there's another way. And if iRobot wants to win in even just the court of public opinion, they have a steep argument to make.

GPS in your car only appears to be more accurate than that because they're typically "snapping" the GPS signal to an underlying road map.

I wonder if the real reason is that they can't get a patent for simpler methods because it's all been done decades ago?

http://www.decawave.com

It really isn't.

I'd love to see the next POTUS make this a priority. Yeah, Orion and the SLS are impressive, but they're mostly fighting yesterday's battles - pretty much a souped up Apollo for similar big feel-good missions where men and women go into LEO/moon/asteroids/maybe-mars for a very short time and fly right back. Why can't we also fund a farside telescope that could work for decades 24/7 providing space science advantages we simply cannot get any other way?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrangian_p...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Atmosphere_and_Dust_Envir...

About the far side of the moon, there is little reason to put a telescope there. It is much easier to put one in orbit around the earch, sun or an earth-sun Lagrange point.

As for manned space exploration versus robotic, I think that is a debate for an other day.

I also imagine there are cost savings by having it sit on the surface of a moon than being its own satellite. No need for worry about orbit corrections or strict weight limitations. The Tsiolkovskiy crater is pretty flat and would make a good candidate for a telescope which would have long antenna arrays laying on the surface.

L2 point would give you almost all the benefits with a lot less risk and cost.

Not only that, but you need a system to account for wheel slippage, etc. No matter how accurate your compass, how awesome your internal map, you're eventually going to go off course. Best case, your bot mows your neighbor's property. Worst case, it wanders into the busy street, or into your pond. Systems like these beacons or underground wire help ensure this doesn't happen.

Source: I have a half-built robot lawnmower on my workbench.

It's not out yet, but they are claiming this summer it will be.

On the planet I live on we don't have cars that are able to drive themselves.

Have legitimate messages so that it doesn't mess up existing systems, and send periodic pings whose radio signals the lawnmower can track. As an added bonus, you'd have a full communications network to talk to it with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system

Anyway, WiFi actually operates in unlicensed spectrum, not in WiFi-specific spectrum, so continuous carrier waves would be legal too.

I don't get what's silly about this. Astronomers are already well known for hating nearby human residences, because they give off visible light that makes it difficult to see the sky. Radio communications are the exact same thing at a different frequency.

But we've got a strong system going of "astronomers can suck it, and if they want to look at the sky without our light getting in the way they can live up on a remote mountaintop where nobody else ever goes". And that's what they do, because imagine if someone could build a telescope near your house and then get laws passed saying you were prohibited from using electric lighting... ever. We like being able to see at night. Maybe we also like having automatic lawn maintenance. Why should astronomers get to stop us?

To answer some questions:

Autonomous lawnmowers are remarkably safe - far safer than standard lawnmowers by a wide margin.

iRobot's potential solution isn't a new one by any means - but the requirement of getting FCC approval for transmission is a rough requirement to overcome.

GPS isn't sufficient and DGPS can't fix multipath problems. Bosch's lawnmower had GPS "straight line" algorithms in it and it had to be pulled because it was destroying people's lawns.

Decawave is an interesting technology, but not what they're using.

Fully autonomous lawnmowers have been around since the 1950's and haven't changed overmuch: http://file.vintageadbrowser.com/tg2i5rpfzmy0yj.jpg

NRAO comment on waiver request: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=60001039394

iRobot reply to comment: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=60001041441

NRAO reply to reply to comment: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=60001042025

I see nothing in the iRobot filings that indicate why they cannot operate in the 5.725-5.875 GHz ISM band. Their system is based on simple time of flight measurements of the signal, and that should work just as well at 5.7-5.9 GHz as it would at 6.2-6.7 GHz.

Also, it is far cheaper and more efficient to pay a gardener for lawn maintenance. They take care of far more than just mowing the lawn.

"... pissing off astronomers looking for a drink"

Also, installing a pet fence, e.g. across driveways and paths can involve asphalt/concrete cutting, and a bunch of trenching. That is the kind of thing that even if you're willing to pay may have you say that it is just not worth it, compared to sticking some stakes in the ground.

The market is interesting here; you have to have someone who will spend enough on a fancy lawnmower, but not so much that they would outsource it to a landscaper.