Lawns provide oxygen, filter rainwater, prevent soil erosion, and are better at absorbing / releasing heat energy than hard surfaces. But they take a lot of water to maintain -- in water-restricted areas, you're probably better off with more drought-tolerant vegetation that will have the same benefits.
The gas-powered lawn mower will always be bad for the environment.
You know there are plant-based ground covers even for wetter climates that better satisfy all your "plus" criteria at even less maintenance?
What lawns provide over those are mostly aesthetic and functional, not ecological.
Getting rid of the lawn, and with it the lawnmower, is the clear ecological choice, even if not always the right personal choice. No koan or paradox involved.
You are creating a false dichotomy. The alternative to a lawn doesn't need to be a hard paved surface -- you can have other plant life there such as wildflowers native to your locale and which survive without the massive supplements of water, fertilizer and pest control lawns often require. Such plant life has the same positive features in regard to erosion, etc. a lawn has without the downsides a mono-culture of grass often requires. Unfortunately some communities actually penalize people who don't have a lawn.
If you don't have an HOA or some city ordinance that requires you to keep it green year around it might not even take much water.
Here in the Pacific Northwest many of us never water our lawns. They get plenty of water from rain except in the summer. In the summer they go dormant. That turns them brown, but doesn't harm them, and when it gets rainy again in the fall they turn back to green.
A few paragraphs into the start the article literally says "The AWM can be manually driven, or it can operate in autonomous mode. The operator sets up autonomous operation by using a “Teaching” mode in which the mower is driven to create a mowing route map using a global navigation satellite system (GNSS)."
> Once a route is saved, the operator launches the AWM’s autonomous operation in “Playback” mode.
When I got my riding lawn mower, they told me to make sure I varied my pattern.
I didn't, and after about a year and a half, I started to notice that I formed ruts in my lawn where I always followed the same path.
That mower looks very, very heavy. I would fear that always following the same pattern, or the same few patterns, would leave ruts and other visible patterns.
Sounds like there's a pretty simple software solution here where the programmed route is automatically varied just like screens do to avoid burn in. Hopefully they implemented something like this.
If the software could do that, then why is predriving the route required? Presumably you have to predrive because it is not advanced enough to route itself around objects, or risks.
There's a big difference in complexity of predriving and having to make minor adjustments vs automatic routing and planning. Kind of like how most cars can do adaptive cruise control but getting full self driving is still a ways out.
The autonomous safety features are a bad idea. By trying to detect objects and stop, they introduce several problems:
1) The system has to successfully detect an object. If this system fails, it will still run over whatever was in the way.
2) The system has to successfully ignore detections which were false positives. When this system fails, the machine will just stop working, which may require a remediation which may cost more than the labor needed to pilot the vehicle.
3) The assumption that the vehicle is safe to operate autonomously because it has safety features will create a lack of concern for safety around the vehicle. This lowered level of concern will result in an increased number of incidents when the safety systems fail, as people will have been operating under the assumption that they won't fail.
4) In the worst case, if the safety systems fail often, they will be disabled (if possible), leading people to believe the system might still be somewhat safe, but unbeknownst to them it's completely unsafe.
It would actually be safer to have no safety systems at all. That way everyone has to assume that the vehicle is unsafe, and therefore they will need to implement their own safety procedures, such as closing off the field it's being used in and not allowing anyone nearby into the field. This conscious fear of the device, combined with a conscious attempt to secure the area, will keep people safer.
1) The seat belt has to successfully detect when it's needed. If that fails, you hit the dashboard at 55mph anyway.
2) The seat belt must ignore false positives. If it cinches up inappropriately, people will struggle to get them working, or release them.
3) If people rely on their seat belts, they will do stupid things like drive off cliffs or into light poles, because people assumed that the seat belt would always work.
4) In the worst case, if the seat belt cinches up inappropriately, people will disable the seat belt, leading people to believe the system might still be somewhat safe... not sure how that follows at all.
It's better to not have seat belts (anti-lock braking, impact-safe dashboards, turn signals) at all. That way everyone has to assume that the vehicle is unsafe, and therefore they will need to implement their own safety procedures, like being 100% perfect drivers...
I suppose lawn mowers don’t have strict requirements like passenger road vehicle do (like ASIL-D or something), otherwise wouldn’t the dependency on cloud service would be a big headache?
I wonder which problem this mower solves compared to traditional low weight, low power, low noise, "small" (x) animal-friendly robo mowers. It it just speed/coverage?
I assume the biggest difference is the area it can handle. I mow about 2 acres of grass, and none of the little mowers are close to fully replacing my zero turn mower. This seems like it could work well for me.
2 acres is almost a hectare (100mx100m). Just a curious question... May I ask if there is a special reason for it to be all grass? Also, could part of it be grazed by animals ?
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 67.7 ms ] threadLawns provide oxygen, filter rainwater, prevent soil erosion, and are better at absorbing / releasing heat energy than hard surfaces. But they take a lot of water to maintain -- in water-restricted areas, you're probably better off with more drought-tolerant vegetation that will have the same benefits.
The gas-powered lawn mower will always be bad for the environment.
What lawns provide over those are mostly aesthetic and functional, not ecological.
Getting rid of the lawn, and with it the lawnmower, is the clear ecological choice, even if not always the right personal choice. No koan or paradox involved.
Here in the Pacific Northwest many of us never water our lawns. They get plenty of water from rain except in the summer. In the summer they go dormant. That turns them brown, but doesn't harm them, and when it gets rainy again in the fall they turn back to green.
No mention of when "owners" of these autonomous mowers will start having to pay $$$/month for their cloudy features to keep working.
When I got my riding lawn mower, they told me to make sure I varied my pattern.
I didn't, and after about a year and a half, I started to notice that I formed ruts in my lawn where I always followed the same path.
That mower looks very, very heavy. I would fear that always following the same pattern, or the same few patterns, would leave ruts and other visible patterns.
1) The system has to successfully detect an object. If this system fails, it will still run over whatever was in the way.
2) The system has to successfully ignore detections which were false positives. When this system fails, the machine will just stop working, which may require a remediation which may cost more than the labor needed to pilot the vehicle.
3) The assumption that the vehicle is safe to operate autonomously because it has safety features will create a lack of concern for safety around the vehicle. This lowered level of concern will result in an increased number of incidents when the safety systems fail, as people will have been operating under the assumption that they won't fail.
4) In the worst case, if the safety systems fail often, they will be disabled (if possible), leading people to believe the system might still be somewhat safe, but unbeknownst to them it's completely unsafe.
It would actually be safer to have no safety systems at all. That way everyone has to assume that the vehicle is unsafe, and therefore they will need to implement their own safety procedures, such as closing off the field it's being used in and not allowing anyone nearby into the field. This conscious fear of the device, combined with a conscious attempt to secure the area, will keep people safer.
1) The seat belt has to successfully detect when it's needed. If that fails, you hit the dashboard at 55mph anyway.
2) The seat belt must ignore false positives. If it cinches up inappropriately, people will struggle to get them working, or release them.
3) If people rely on their seat belts, they will do stupid things like drive off cliffs or into light poles, because people assumed that the seat belt would always work.
4) In the worst case, if the seat belt cinches up inappropriately, people will disable the seat belt, leading people to believe the system might still be somewhat safe... not sure how that follows at all.
It's better to not have seat belts (anti-lock braking, impact-safe dashboards, turn signals) at all. That way everyone has to assume that the vehicle is unsafe, and therefore they will need to implement their own safety procedures, like being 100% perfect drivers...
(x) down to a certain animal size.
Does it even try to detect sensitive wildlife?