Mowing the lawn can be a tedious chore, especially when you lack the right tools. But the boundless open-source world offers more than just automation—it turns the task into a canvas for your creativity. How? By building a robot called Ardumower, controlled by Arduino and RTK-GPS hardware, with no need for a physical perimeter.
The Limits of Robot Vacuums
For an average price of 200 euros, you can leave the floor vacuuming to a small robot. The web is full of hacks, modifications, and repair guides for these devices, not to mention cat videos that use them as taxis, and the accidents when they come across a scatological surprise. That detail exposes the technical limitations of robot vacuums. In general, they are quite clumsy, bumping into walls, chairs, and baseboards to change direction.
From Vacuuming to Lawn Mowing
But the real question is whether we can extend the same concept to a similar task like mowing the lawn. The main difference is that there is no perimeter, and a robotic lawn mower without physical limits is not a good idea—unless we find an alternative. That's where the open-source world steps in to offer Ardumower, an experimental mower whose "Sunray" variant uses RTK-GPS hardware.
How RTK-GPS Works
What does that mean exactly? Simple: consumer-grade GPS devices have enough resolution to indicate the position of a vehicle or a person (unless there is some background manipulation involved), but not to control an object within a predefined area. RTK-GPS systems optimize resolution and reduce the margin of error to within a few centimeters. This opens a wide range of possibilities, including precise control of the lawn mower—to the point that you could "draw with it."
Building Your Own Ardumower Sunray
Imagine the potential: instead of struggling with cuts and curves, all you have to do is enter the parameters, define the perimeter, and let the Ardumower Sunray handle the heavy lifting. The Ardumower wiki contains the complete guide for assembling and configuring the mower. Needless to say, it is not a project designed for beginners, and the final cost is not easy to digest (more than a thousand euros for a complete unit), but if you seek a greater challenge and have space in your garden, why not?
Source: Hackster.io
