Can This Robot Really Mow Your Lawn?

Can This Robot Really Mow Your Lawn?, One woman let the Lawnbott loose in her family’s yard and lived to tell about it. The first thing you should know about a robot lawnmower (aka the LawnBott) is that it might take on a life of its own. From the minute the box showed up on my doorstep, my husband was itching to tear it open and see what it could do. Soon, word spread to my 10-year-old nephew that there was, in fact, a robot at my house. And that it could mow the grass.

In fact, that’s pretty much how I lost control of the great LawnBott experiment one Saturday morning. My husband and nephew had the robot out in the yard in a flash. More specifically, it was the new Kyodo America LB1500 SpyderEVO, which is about the size of two shoeboxes and weighs 25 pounds. You charge the battery up for a few hours then as the press person promised “never mow your lawn again.”

We sat the thing down in our small city yard (about 20×30 feet) and switched it on with a small crowd of onlookers. It went back and forth a few times, started beeping and shut itself off without mowing a blade of grass. This happened a few more times before I dug out the instruction manual, which is as thick as a small novel. (On closer inspection, that’s because it’s in three languages.)

My husband, who’s the mower of grass at our house, then started swearing to me that he’d already read the instructions. So we began wishing for a remote control; then quickly decided the robot just wanted to roam free. Naturally, we headed to a nearby park and basically set it down in a soccer field. It beeped at us in incomprehensible robot language.

At this point, we did spend a few minutes daydreaming about the competition. The John Deere Tango E5 Autonomous Mower looks to be about the same size as the Lawnbott and works on the same general principle. It mows the lawn while you sip lemonade and takes itself back to a charging station when the battery is low. Perhaps best of all, the brochure promises that your local John Deere dealer will help install the thing, but, then again, it only appears to be available in Europe.