spooknik / OpenMower

Let's upgrade cheap off-the-shelf robotic mowers to modern, smart RTK GPS based lawn mowing robots!

OpenMower

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About the Project

⚠️ DISCLAIMER:

IF YOU ARE NOT 100% SURE WHAT YOU ARE DOING, PLEASE DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME! ASK IN , IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS!

Project Intro Video

If you want to see a quick overview, you can check out this video:

Let's be honest: The current generation of robotic lawn mowers sucks. Basically all of these bots drive in a random direction until they hit the border of the lawn, rotate for a randomized duration and repeat. I think we can do better!

Therefore, we have disassembled the cheapest off-the-shelf robotic mower we could find (YardForce Classic 500) and were surprised that the hardware itself is actually quite decent:

• Geared sensored brushless motors for the wheels
• A sensored brushless motor for the mower motor itself
• The whole construction seems robust, waterproof and all in all thought through
• All components are connected using standard connectors, therefore upgrading the hardware is easily possible.

The bottom line is: The bot itself is surprisingly high quality and doesn't need to be changed at all. We just need some better software in there.

Project Goals

Here is a quick overview of this project's goals:

✔️ Autonomous Lawn Mowing: Obviously, the device should be able to mow the lawn automatically.

✔️ Good Safety: The device must be safe, e.g. emergency stop if lifted or crashed.

✔️ No Perimeter Wire Needed: We want to be flexible and support multiple mowing areas.

✔️ Low Cost: It should be cheaper than a mid range off-the-shelf product

✔️ Open Source: I want to share knowledge and enable others to build an OpenMower as well.

✔️ Nice to Look At: You should not be ashamed to have an OpenMower mowing your lawn.

✔️ Avoid Obstacles: The mower should detect obstacles and avoid them during mowing.

✔️ Rain Detection: The device should be able to detect bad weather conditions and pause mowing until they improve.

Current State

It's not really that easy to upgrade the robot, since unfortunately the mainboard used by those bots is proprietary. Therefore the first step is to create a mainboard which then can be used to deploy some better software later on. This is what we are currently working on.

Hardware

The first mainboard PCB is almost done. It currently looks like this:

Hardware To-Do:

• Low Level Firmware Implementation
  • Voltage / Current Sense
  • Emergency Stop Button tracking
  • IMU Communication
  • Rain Sensor
  • Charging State
  • Sound Module
  • UI Board Communication
  • Low Power Mode
• ROS Hardware Interface
• Hardware Redesign (bugs / enhancements):
  • Digial Emergency Stop Signal from Pico to xESC
  • Sound Module Pinout needs to be adapted to DFPlayer
  • XT60 Power Connector needs to be connected to main power instead of charging input

Software

The basic software is basically done; Our prototype works as intended (but is not able to avoid obstacles yet).

The software for the robot can be found in a separate repository: https://github.com/ClemensElflein/open_mower_ros

Software To-Do:

• Mowing State Machine (Docking / Mowing, ...)
• Path Planning
• Obstacle Avoidance
• App / Visualization

How You Can Help

The project is currently much more advanced than it might currently look on this page. The prototype below is able to mow our lawn without problems. But the documentation is missing.

Therefore, at the current state, you can only wait until I have uploaded all code and documentation to this repository. Star this repository in order to get updates!

Compatible Robotic Mowers

While disassembling the bot, I wondered about its mainboard: Instead of "YardForce" it read "GForce". After checking the internet for "GForce" robots, I found that that very similar looking robotic mowers are sold under the Herkules brand. Naturally I tried to dig deeper and actually found evidence that the mainboard is manufactured by some chinese company (SUMTEC Hardware).

It is therefore quite safe to assume that many robot mowers are basically the same device in a different case. This would be a huge win for the community, since this would mean that by making one of those robots smarter, we could upgrade A LOT OF ROBOTS!

Therefore it might be a good idea to start a list of compatible devices. So if you have a cheap robotic lawn mower, it would be nice of you to check, if it contains the same mainboard as ours and send me some pictures / model numbers.

More Infos

This page only contains the basic overview of the project. To follow my current development state, check out my Blog.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Feel free to use the design in your private/educational projects, but don't try to sell the design or products based on it without getting my consent first. The idea here is to share knowledge, not to enable others to simply sell my work. Thank you for understanding.