Feel too hot and lazy to mow the lawn in the late-summer heat? Why not let Miimo -- the first entry in the home robotics market from Honda -- do it for you.
Miimo
is a robotic lawnmower that works via electronic sensors to continuously cut grass and safely navigate slopes and obstacles, according to the company, which for 10 years has developed an intelligent humanoid robot called ASIMO. ASIMO, which walks and talks and has been lauded for its innovation, is less than practical for everyday use and is not commercially available.
Miimo, on the other hand, is designed for the home consumer market, looking and performing somewhat like iRobot’s Roomba robotic vacuum and aimed at helping make a common task easier, safer, and more environmentally friendly. Miimo will join existing robotic lawnmowers like Robomow and Husqvarna’s Auto Mower in the European market early next year, with release in the US sometime thereafter.
Honda has entered the home robotics market with Miimo, a robotic lawn mower that communicates electronically with a perimeter wire to stay within the confines of a lawn or patch of grass. It cuts continuously with a range of settings and blade heights according to user preference. (Source: Honda)
Miimo works by communicating with an electronic signal in a perimeter wire around a lawn or a patch of grass, navigating the area to be groomed and cutting just 2mm to 3mm of grass at a time. By cutting in this way, the robot creates grass clippings so small that rather than be collected, they are spread across the lawn to eventually break down as a natural fertilizer, according to Honda.
Miimo has three blades that Honda said it designed to sustain minimal damage if they come into contact with sharp or hard objects in the grass. Rather than shatter on impact, they bend, which means broken blade shards won’t be left on the lawn. The robot also has so-called “bump” sensors that detect whether it comes into contact with an object, activating a sensor that will turn and move the robot away from the impact point.
Users can adjust the robot’s blade height between 20mm and 60mm depending on preference, as well as choose from three modes of operation -- random, directional, or mixed. In the first mode, the robot mows the lawn without a specific pattern, while the second mode features a back-and-forth movement with increased speed. In mixed mode, the robot employs both random and directional methods to cut grass, according to Honda.
The robot also has the ability to ascend slopes and will automatically reduce its wheel speed if its hits a patch of thick or long grass or rough terrain. Additionally, Honda has designed Miimo with built-in safety sensors that will activate if the robot leaves the ground. If this happens, the mower will shut down completely, sound an alarm, and cannot start again until a user enters the proper PIN.
Miimo also features a self-charging lithium-ion battery that monitors its power level and autonomously returns to its docking station when it needs recharging. As with other robotic mowers, this type of power minimizes environmental impact, reducing emissions that come with gasoline-driven lawnmowers, as well as reducing noise pollution.
Hi Rob. It does what they call a roboscan and follows the wire around the edge of the yard. From what I can tell it uses a compass, since it doesnt have GPS, and then calculates dimensions of the yard. It then employs a special piece of software that tells it the best way to cut the lawn. SInce it cant track perfectly straight, they sue a cross hatch style cut pattern cutting one diagonal direction with 5-6 spaces between, then when it gets to the end of the lawn it turns at 90 degrees to the orignal cuts and does the same thing. It changes its entry point every time it leaves the perimeter from day to day so that the pattern is not the same. On my .5 acres if you were to leave the grass to get very long, you would notice that the mower misses about 5% of the lawn leaving little clumps the size of a baseball here and there. The next time it goes out, it will usually get all those spots. Once regular cutting begins the missed spots are never long enough to notice so this tenchique seems towork well. As I stated earlier my yard always looks like a golf course :)
You can manually take control of the mower with a simple remote on top if you want to cut areas outside the perimter wire or strange areas it cant normally get to. You can also drive from one zone to another if you have multiple unattached cut areas (back yard vs front yard)
My mower goes out every couple days while we sleep at night and takes about 2-3 hrs to do its job. Its very quiet. When I do allow it out on weekends during the day so I can watch it, many of the neighbours gather round to watch also lol. We have also had some looky loos watch from the street with much excitement. Their comments are usually quite humorous. My robomower docks behind my house so that noone can see it on display (theft). I have considered building a house for it to drive into that protects it, but I live in such a remote area amongst farms that I'm not concerned about neighbours taking it and noone really messes around in our neighbourhood (the farmers tend to have guns lol). If I lives in a downtown area, I would probably stick to locking it up and just manuually setting it free every couple days. Its just a simple push the go butto nand it starts cutting.
I hear you, Rich. Lots of opportunity for scares--entertaining some, and others, potentially scary. Now what about one of these guys for racking up the leaves now that we're hitting fall season, or spreading mulch, for that matter. Now that would really be a technological advance and would sign me up for the little guy ASAP.
This looks similar to a robo-mower that was introduced by a company called Friendly Robotics in 2006. At the time, the engineers at Friendly Robotics believed the Robo-Mower would become nearly as ubiquitous as the garage door opener.
This sounds a LOT more usefull than the one in an earlier article that replaced a doctor. My question is whether it will cut the 12" weeds/grass that cover my yard?
I would pay almost anything to not have to cut the grass/weeds ever again.
May be you could teach it to attack any neighborhood kids that wander into your yard. If it ground them up into small enough pieces it wouldn't be detectable.
I got my robomower out of chicago off Kijiji for $450. A steal even if I do live in western Canada and had to ship it haha! Mine is model RL1000 which was the largest model they had at the time. They have a new model called RL2000 which I've been told is exactly the same although I'm not 100% sure then why they would change the model#. IF you look hard enough there are used mowers out there and they are so over built that they never fail. Parts are avaialble though......
Yes the value I get from my robomower is I get 15 cuts per month out of it, and thus perfect lawn all the time. Robomower's version are all way less costly than this Honda unit and the cut height is adjustable to much better lengths. It does kill batteries though about every 3 years, and they cost $150 to replace.
The value of it would be to have it on a schedule, so it can keep cutting when you are not there.
I wonder how it would perform in the fall with leaves falling on the lawn. If it can run continuously (minus the recharging time), it could shred all the leaves back into the lawn as they fall - that time of the year the grass is not growing much anyway. This would be a great way to feed the lawn.
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