You Should Share Your Robotic Lawnmower With Your Neighbors
If you want to meet people in your area, buy a robotic lawnmower. Over the past few weeks I have been amazed by the traffic that is generated using my Mammotion Luba 2 . People stop to watch how it works, bring their children, and cars slow down, back up, and then stop to watch. But the best thing I’ve found with a robotic lawnmower is this: if you can share your robotic lawnmower with your closest neighbors, what was a good value becomes a great value.
Robots don’t care about property lines
I live in a city on a street with reasonably sized residential lots of about 3,000 square feet, and almost every house on the block has a lawn. Lawns vary in size, but all are large enough to require a lawn mower, and many people on the block rely on lawn mowers. Since our lots are quite small and the Mammotion Luba 2 is designed for a much larger space, I wondered if I could make the Luba think all the extra houses on the block were part of the same map and mow them down too. Spoiler: It works. The more houses a single robot can mow, the more value you get from a robotic lawnmower (and I generally think it’s a value purchase anyway).
An interesting aspect of robotic lawnmowers came up during a conversation with the Husqvarna team, who noted that robots aren’t very good at keeping up with perceived boundaries like property lines, so many lawnmowers need an underground wire to accurately mark the perimeter. Now that most bots are wireless, we teach the bots where the border is by walking around the perimeter for the first time and creating paths between different areas. One property can have multiple areas mapped, just like your home has many rooms for a robot vacuum cleaner. Your neighbor’s lawn could be just another piece of land, and you can pave the way to it. Even the street itself is just another area that the robot must cross to get to another mapped area, just like a sidewalk or driveway. At the very least, robot vacuums are a great way to keep the hellstrip (the narrow space between the sidewalk and curb) mowed and uniform on many properties.
Get permission and line of sight
Once I got permission from the neighbors to check it out, I parked the GPS tower for “Lyuba” in a location that provided a clear line of sight to the two houses across the street and the house next door. Remember that you place a GPS tower based on mapped areas, but if you plan to use it on multiple homes, that mapped area will simply expand and you may have to think about a new location for the tower.
Using the remote control, I guided the robot to new areas to be mapped and continued to add mapped areas in each yard, giving them names and creating connection paths between the mapped areas. So my neighbor across the street mapped her yard with walkways between her property and then my neighbor had the same thing. I did not make a passage between the houses, which I will explain a little later. At some point, all four houses, two on each side of the street, were mapped, and once the robot was in those locations, it mowed the areas in the same way as the main house it was mapped on.
Security Considerations
On the lawn, the robot’s safety is not in question (the biggest threat is that someone will come up and grab it). It also doesn’t pose a major safety concern for people or pets while cutting grass – it just moves too slowly. But if he’s left unattended on the street, he could be run over, and he’s more likely to encounter people and dogs on sidewalks. The bottom line is this: the robot is safe on your lawn, but when you map a path and ask it to leave your lawn, it can interact with the rest of the world, which can become a burden, a risk to your investment, or just plain hassle. The best way to deal with this is to manually guide the robot using the remote control, especially across the street.
Planning is the key to success
Now that all of this is mapped, remember that multiple people probably won’t have access to the robot’s controls since the association lives on the same phone. With some robots you can add additional users, and with others I’m sure this will happen. Until then, one solution is scheduling, which would mean that as long as the robot is in a designated area or has a crosswalk attached to it, it will perform a given scheduled mowing. If there is no path, you will have to be responsible for getting the robot to walk along it, but it is no more work than taking the trash to the curb. The second solution is to leave a cheap tablet with the robot with the app loaded so that anyone who wants to use the robot can walk up, grab the tablet, and use it to take the robot to their property, mow, and then return it.
Robotic lawn mowers range in price from $1,500 to $5,000. The Mammotion Luba 2 we used for this experiment costs $2,899, and while I think that’s a reasonable price for a robotic lawnmower, it would be a lot less if shared with a few neighbors. You all agree to jointly maintain the robot and share costs as necessary, such as purchasing new blades.