Application for mowing lawns without human participation

Creating a smart lawn mower for cutting grass without human interference.

The customer wants to bring to the market an innovative solution that changes the core concept of the roadside lawn maintenance process. The main idea of the project is to cut grass without human participation. 

Development of a convenient cross-platform mobile application to set up mower and remote controlling of the grass-cutting process.

To achieve this goal, we needed to add the following features to an ordinary lawnmower:

• the ability to move on the lawn without human interference;
• the ability to «remember» and observe the boundaries of the lawn or lawns that need to be serviced;
• the ability to communicate with the owner at a small distance during the initial performance setup of device, for example, setting the boundaries of the lawn; and at a great distance, when the owner is far away and wants to see what is happening to the lawnmower;
• the ability to «see» the obstacle - if a child or an animal enters the lawn, the lawnmower should stop;
• the ability to control the battery charge of the mower.

Our company has taken on all of the functions mentioned above.

Implementation of the Nvidia Jetson board with WiFi and BLE connectivity, embedded camera and GPS module. Server-side - hosted in the Amazon cloud.

We have offered a technical solution based on AWS, as they provide a large number of ready-made resources, eliminating extra work.

We proposed to implement the control part of the lawn mower on the basis of the Nvidia Jetson board, for the reason that the 128-cores GPU provides it with higher performance, compared to competitors' boards, which is especially important for artificial intelligence tasks.

We have added modules to Nvidia Jetson that support WiFi and BLE connectivity. BLE will be used to initialize the lawn mower and to control it manually using smartphone as a remote control, and Wifi - to communicate with the cloud and monitor from the owners` smartphone.

In addition, we proposed to embed a camera to the Nvidia Jetson, solving two tasks:  

1. providing information for analysis of obstacles presence;
2. enabling the customer to observe the mower's location.

In addition, a GPS module will be connected to Nvidia Jetson, allowing it to control mower  movement and prevent it from leaving the cultivated area.

Another component of the project is the server-side hosted in the Amazon cloud. The server-side serves as a link between the mower control part and the mobile application allowing user to configure device settings. The connection of server-side with the mower and the mobile application provides:

• transmitting the image from the video camera to the user’s smartphone;
• transfer the schedule of mower’s sessions from smartphone to mower;
• sending a message on smartphone about an exceptional case, such as emerging of obstacle on the way of the mower;
• cloud storage of device initialization settings, configured by user;
• informing the smartphone that a new version of firmware is available and updating it after user confirmation, uploading a new version of firmware to the mower.

The last component of the system is the mobile application. Its main function is to perform the initial installation of the mower. Smartphone communicates with the device via BLE and the user manually controls it by smartphone  - the same way as by  the remote control. The user defines lawn boundaries and these configurations are stored in the device memory and in the cloud.

The other functions are:

• viewing video from the mower’s camera;
• setting the schedule of mower sessions;
• turning off the mower in case of obstruction report;
• updating mower firmware;
• loading the pre-saved configuration onto the mower.