DIY Robot Lawn Mower

Video Info

Description:

Home made robot lawn mower. Barbie Jeep + control system + blades & motors. Uses buried wire (electronic dog fence), bumpers, and flaps for navigation. Biased random steering. Transcript: So heres the world famous pink and green lawn mower. Pink for these wheels this thing started out life as a Barbie Jeep and green for this battery doesnt use any gas. Its, uh, got little bumpers...Ill show you how those things work. Its got little flaps...coated with aluminum so that when they touch, the mower knows its hit something. Its got a little control system a *really* little control system: couple of NAND gates, couple of timers, some relays, stuff like that. And thats the basic mower that just responds to the bumpers and the flaps. But its also got I dont know if you can see it some coils down here that listen to my electronic dog fence, and a circuit I got off the internet that reads those guys, and treats them just like the bumpers or the flaps, so whenever it hits something it goes in the other direction, until it hits something and then it goes in the other direction. So... Let me turn it over, and take a look at the cutters. Theres three motors with little plastic wheels [disks] on them, little razor blades attached to the wheels [disks], and thats it for the cutting. There you can see the...what I salvaged from the Barbie Jeep, the motors and the wheels and the chassis. Its got an independent suspension, so it doesnt get hung up too much. Here Ill show you how that works. I dont know if you can see it. Anyway, without this it gets stuck all the time. So, thats, thats the mower. Let me plug it in [connect it to the battery] and turn it on. Oh, and one more thing I didnt show you...the steering. Steering is mostly random; its not controlled. But there is this little scrubber here, so that when the mowers going forwards, it tries to turn the wheel to the right; When the mowers going backwards, it tries to turn the wheel to the left, so it doesnt go back and forth over the same path all the time. All right let me turn it on. [Music: Guinea Pigs Quest] [Music: Waltz of the Toddlers] Oh, it runs like this for about an hour. Maybe an hour and a half. Gets most of the grass in this yard. But, you know, it leaves a little bit. I dont care about that. Eventually it gets it all. This yard hasnt been cut by anything else for about a year, so you can see eventually it gets it all. But it doesnt get the edges at all. You gotta do that with a lawn mower. Im not going to worry about that.

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