BEDFORD, Mass. (AP) – Robot vacuums have now been around long enough that you might watch one bump around a living room and think, why isn’t there a robot that could mow my lawn? Turns out, it’s not for lack of trying.
For more than a decade, iRobot, the company behind the Roomba vacuumbot, has been working – and working – on robotic lawn mowers. Now it finally has something to show for the effort, though it’s come at a cost.
“Honestly, this robot drove me insane,” said iRobot CEO Colin Angle after showing off Terra, the company’s long-awaited first lawn mower. “It has been an obsession.”
The flat square autonomous grass-cutter that Angle’s company unveiled Wednesday resulted from a protracted engineering struggle that included dead-end experiments and a conflict with radio astronomers.
Angle and his colleagues have been fielding the question, “So, when are you going to mow my lawn?” since the company starting selling Roombas in 2002. But teaching a robot to navigate a typical American yard without destroying its flowerbeds was harder than it first seemed. “There was a lot of despair and frustration on the journey,” Angle said.