As someone who mowed approximately 10,846 lawns during my teenage years, the news about the robotic lawnmower piqued my interest. Or, more appropriately, it raised my blood-pressure.
Why couldn’t they have invented this thing in 1986? I would have leased one, inputted the coordinates for the neighbors’ lawns I’d promised to mow each week, then relaxed in a hammock while my autonomous laborer did my dirty work. “Don’t forget the parkways, robot!”
Here’s the scoop: San Francisco-based Electric Sheep Robotics turns commercially available landscaping devices into autonomous machines with the goal of solving the industry’s labor shortage and increasing margins. They currently offer the clamp-on Dexter Mega robot for gas and electric lawn mowers. (They don’t, however, offer advice to emergency call centers for handling the frantic phone calls to 911 with reports of runaway lawnmowers.)
Programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and programmable automation controllers (PACs) provide viable options for machine control. This Control Design collection explains the differences...
Motion control engineers tend to focus on torque and speed specifications during the design process, but often fail to notice the unique features that differentiate a high-quality...
This white paper describes advantages of using advanced angle sensor technologies and focuses on best practices for correctly implementing non-contact and touchless angle sensors...
