Shulou(Shulou.com)05/31 Report--

It may look like an ordinary robotic lawn mower unconsciously rolling across lawns in suburbs across the country, but OpenMower is more than that, thanks to the clever use of two Raspberry Pi boards. The brainchild of German tech entrepreneur Clemens Elflein, OpenMower uses the Raspberry Pi 4 and $4 Raspberry Pi Pico to upgrade the internal structure of a standard robotic mower to make it smarter, Hackster reports.

In contrast to weaponized robotic vacuum cleaners, most robotic lawn mowers operate using peripheral wires that they may not be able to cross. They stay within an area defined by wires, and if they encounter something or detect an obstacle in their path, they change direction randomly and advance until they encounter another obstacle or wire. In this way, they cut all the grass, but produce random patterns and may produce uneven cutting.

To solve this problem, Elflein took apart an off-the-shelf robotic mower. He found it assembled using standard connectors, so the case, motor, chassis, and blades were retained, but it received significant electronic upgrades such as the Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi Pico, custom speed control systems, and an Ardusimple RTK(real-time kinematics)GPS board. RTK GPS boards provide coarse GPS position data and correction streams (RTKs) that improve accuracy from meters to centimeters.

The last component is crucial because it allows OpenMower to shed bulky perimeter wires and know exactly where it is within the lawn, support multiple mowing areas and move back and forth in regular patterns rather than rotating randomly. It still has the ability to avoid obstacles because the Raspberry Pi Pico acts as a low-level controller, interfacing with sensors and reporting to the Raspberry Pi 4.

OpenMower is still a work in progress, with a host of features yet to be implemented, including an object avoidance system and a mobile app. Currently, Xbox controllers are used to manually drive mowers to set boundaries for mowing areas and drive circles around immovable objects such as trees to mark off-limits areas. Pi 4 uses RTK data from the Internet and combines it with feeds from its own GPS module to calculate its precise position and uses custom software to plan an efficient mowing route through a defined area, leaving behind a beautiful pattern.

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