THE ROBOT MOWER

The main project of the site: THE ROBOT MOWER.

Necessity is the mother of invention, mine is not an invention but a try to create a DIY, low cost and flexible robot mower, that can autonomously cut my lawn for me. 

When I was thinking on how to put the cutter part on it, a quite lot of idea grows up. One in particular : why create a robot that can do only one thing? 

Why not create a robot where I can mount all this ideas?

In this way, the project evolved, still focused on a robot lawn mower but with an eye to the possibility to change the cutter part with other tools. 

I started an year ago creating the first prototype, made in wood, with a raspberry pi mounted on it. 

Just a try to understand how much hard could be realize it. Not so bad, a lot of information could be get from the internet. So lets start with the next one


Currently, all of the first prototype has been change, only the motor driver shield and the original shape idea is still in the new one but I don't exclude that can be also that changed .

Now, on the aluminium frame is mounted:

the core pc, one ASUS EEEPC with ROS (http://www.ros.org/wiki/)
the motor driver shield (SDC2130 from roboteq.com);
2 x motor 24V DC 18A max, from an automatic garage door, with 2 encoder after mounted;
2 x battery 12V 18Ah;
2 x led light;
one Kinect for laser scanning;


I choices the Kinect because is easy to find out and the ROS os is well documented on how to setup your robot (also the motor driver shield is supported) and use the Kinect.


 At the moment I'm trying to get ROS working, I'm still on the navigation stack and I need also to find/write a algorithm that can generate a path that cover all of the surface of the field.


If someone is interested on the project or want to help me is welcome.