I have the Automower 305 which is the baby to this one. I run mine mainly at night and I can't even hear it and never had a complain from the neighbours. Also I usually don't turn it off for bbq's and most people actually end up standing and the edge of the garden watching it. It is actually quite hypnotic and very relaxing watching it move around the lawn. One thing that did surprise me is that on the 305 when the blades start it is will beep 5 times which I noticed that yours doesn't. My daughter doesn't like it too much but she also doesn't like the roomba as well. Can't wait to see what you do with yours.
I don't know why, but sometimes it beeps 5 times and sometimes it doesn't. Perhaps it's to do with different modes, for example starting a new mow sequence vs resuming from pause. In the video I kept pausing and resuming the mower, and I don't think it beeps then.
I bought the 305 model (the smaller one) 2yrs 8 mths ago, and it has been fantastic at mowing the lawn. Something I have noticed is the continual mulching has improved the grass, as well as not allowing weeds to flower has made my lawn healthy and soft. I calculated the cost of having someone else mow (I cant do it, I have cancer and lose energy very quickly) vs the cost of the mower, it should pay for itself in just over 3 years. In that time I have had to replace the wheel treads twice ( AU $100 each time) and the central back wheel twice, ( au $45 each time,) and the battery once (under warranty). Now, 8 months after the warranty expired, the motherboard has blown up, costing over AU $600 to replace. (not counting labour or GST) Its a wonderful gadget, but for a pensioner, its very expensive and had I known how high the maintenance costs are, I probably wouldn't have bought one..
I doubt gps would have the accuracy or precision for a lawn mower. I have been working a autonomous lawn mower for a little while and the best solution I have discovered is using telemetry and other cues from the environment. Maybe SLAM mixed with IMU and encoder data would give it the data required for yard sized navigation. Robot operating system may be a good place to start with the lawn mowing automation. Good luck with making it better.
Regular GPS definitely won't do it alone. My yard isn't much bigger than the position variation due to atmospheric disturbance! What I'm hoping to do is experiment with differential GPS and other local positioning systems once I can afford to buy the parts.
This reminds me of the old roomba with bump and go technology - why do they not just do even lines and stripes so it never misses anything? The roomba we used to have often had bits missed, so you either had to have it going most of the time to get all the bits, or parts got missed Would be good to have an update on this in a month, as apparently the continuous mowing makes your lawn much nicer - and to see how its going after a month!
The Husqvarna dealer said they experimented with a structured mowing pattern, but it didn't work as well as random dancing (I mean, random bouncing) because it left lines in the lawn. With many random cuts, the lawn ends up very even with no marks in it. There will definitely be updates! There are a few things I want to try, such as building a tunnel under my house so the mower can reach the front lawn.
Oh thats a cool idea! When i was looking at this i was debating having a larger sized doggy door with RFID so the mower can go through but not the doggies :D
I think that's the way it works. There's supposed to be some way to define a transit area where the mower just passes along between different mowing areas, but I haven't looked at the details yet. More fun to be had :-)
Nice review and I certainly considered buying one of these units. However, I went to 5 Sydney dealers and not one of them would install the wires for me. I wrote to Husqvarna asking about installers and they could be bothered to respond to me. So I bought the best Honda self propelled machine instead.
I think that making these mowers less reliant on the boundary wire, and perhaps some type of vision system that is tied in with the GPS and gyroscope plus I wonder weather a laser mapping system in the same way as the Neato botvac...
Great series. Thanks. Very patient. Were/Are you a teacher/lecturer? Anyway, I am looking for something like this lawn mower but without the mowing. Just a base for a roving CCTV camera. Any to recommend? thanks
Thanks for the video! I loved it and am waiting on more. My question is, can it detect if its raining during its schedule and stay put or does it not care at all? I would think you wouldn't want it cutting when the grass was wet?
It doesn't have a rain sensor, but according to the dealer who did the installation it doesn't matter. It'll run fine whether it's dry or wet. However, we'd had 2 weeks of *really* bad weather before the installation, and the ground was soaking wet. You can see in the video that it was even raining while the dealer was installing it. The result was that we had a big muddy patch near the bottom of the garden, and the mower chewed it up a bit. I didn't use the mower for about 5 days after it was installed because I had to let that part of the ground dry out a little bit. But for normal rain, it doesn't matter. There is meant to be something that changes the mowing schedule depending on weather conditions but I don't know how it works yet. There's also a cool DIY project to make a rain sensor and attach it to the mower, so that if it starts raining the mower will park itself and wait until the weather is better. I'm going to talk more about that in another video.
Mann! I can't wait! Yeah this really makes my imagination run pretty wild. I've got almost a flat acre begging for something like this! Id much rather have this thing find the yellow jackets nest in the fall instead of me haha.
Does it have an open API? If it's in any way connected to the internet, it should have an preferably HTTP API to start/stop the device? BTW a smart move from husqvarna, your videos really show the convenience and stability of the product.
Double rainbow all the way across the sky! I've always wondered how the parking feature works. I read somewhere that the base station transmits some sort of modulated IR signal that the vehicle looks for. It would be great if you could shed some light (pun not intended) on how this works, and how we could DIY something like this.
Yes, that's an interesting part of how it works. The homing process is much faster and more efficient than I expected. The mower really seems to know where it's going, and lines itself up with the base station very accurately. I need to figure out how it does that, and make a video about it.
The biggest problem I have with this type of mower, and the roomba for that matter are the coverage algorithm. There are areas it may never hit and areas it will hit time and time again. The differential gps concept interests me. Would you change the algorithm so it's more procedural? or would you still let it randomly move about?
Not quite what I dreamed up when I was 15 back in the 70's. Of course then it was Z80, 4040 and 8080; maybe the 8085 was out back then. It was much larger and had a blades on three rims which rotated vertically with 4 100w solar panels like we have today going to 4 deep cycle batteries. It was to be controlled from a house system using planted navigation marks that it would use with an internal INS system so it knew where it was. It would just execute a pre-plan routine and avoid marked areas. At that time I couldn't sort out the pet,animal or possibly a baby or alike in the cutting zone. Even using IR would be a problem. When the ground heats up in the summer it could mask out the lifeform and just keep going. More I tried to defeat it meant more power, larger battery store and so-on. On this given design am not overall impressed. It's no better than the auto hoover I have. Always bumping into things and getting stuck.upside it could be done bi-daily. What it misses one day it could get the next day I guess.
what happens if there is a power cut while it's mowing? can it detect the edge wire is offline or will it just go over the wire and get stuck? also no wifi control or anything?
Awesome question! (Runs outside to try it....) No wifi, which totally, massively, sucks. Lack of integration options is one of the things I'm going to cover in a future video, hopefully with a hacky DIY solution in keeping with my usual videos
With my 305 it will basically report a "no loop signa"l and stop. Sometimes it will start when the power comes back and sometime it will not. but worst case is that you need to press the start button again.
It would be nice to have some primary location to discuss these projects. Right now it's split between RU-vid comments, Facebook, comments on the SuperHouse.tv site, Twitter, and the Freetronics forum. I can't keep track of it all!
How about showing us how to give the robot a self defense system. I will not be buying another one until it can defend itself. Like bicycles, police will not investigate or even issue a police report, which you will need to file a homeowners claim. At over thousand dollars a whack, and no insurance companies willing to insure them, I will not be buying another, unless there is a theft deterrent. The alarm does not sound nearly loud enough. The cook would simply throw it in his trunk and toss a blanket over it. He could easily drive away. The alarm we needs to be loud enough to be heard at a distance of at least three or four blocks and cause discomfort to the thief. Tasers located at any grip points would be a welcome addition. A built-in GPS that would detect when the mower is moving more than 5 mph, could also be used to deploy a cloud of pepper spray. Simply making that thing useless and requiring a four digit code is no deterrent to theft. The crooks are too stupid to know that these things can't be operated once taken.
My 435 AWD has been in repair shop for 3 months now. I am paying monthly payments on my automower on top of monthly payments to a local lawn service. The company is completely unresponsive and unsympathetic to my situation. How long is too long for a repair? This was a known factory defect. European customers were compensated with cash payments. If this were a new car purchase the dealer would provide a loaner. I don’t understand how husqvarna can stand by these business practices. DO NOT BUY AN AUTOMOWER
