Saying goodbye to a robot friend
My automated lawnmower experiment didn't live up to the hype
Sometimes, new technology just isn't ready for prime time.
It's ok. To consider yourself a futurist, you have to take chances on new gadgets and gizmos. And sometimes these things just don't live up to the hype. Maybe the technology just isn't quite there yet. Or maybe it's simply a poor execution at the product level.
For me, a recent tech letdown came by way of a robot lawnmower.
Yep, I've written about it several times over the past few years. It was one of the first big purchases I made for our new home. While our backyard had a relatively small patch of grass, I didn't want to be a sucker pushing a lawnmower around. I wanted to enjoy the good life. I wanted to experience the future that Donald Duck imagined in his seminal work, "Donald Duck Instant Millionaire"!
The easy comparison here is the robot vacuum. If you were one of those early vacuum adopters, you probably experienced the same growing pains that I did with my lawnmower. It would get confused. It would get stuck. It would simply not function as it was intended to.
I can't speak for all robot lawnmowers, but I can share my experiences with the Worx Landroid. As much as I loved the name, it just gave me more headaches than I would have had if I just pushed around a lawnmower.
The installation process of running a wire around the perimeter of your lawn just feels archaic. It was a pain in the butt for me and my lawn isn't even that big! Imagine doing that for a large piece of property. It's really a non-starter for most folks.
In just a few short years, these lawnmowers have gotten smarter with cameras, GPS, and LiDAR to render the perimeter wire almost obsolete. But sadly, that technology has driven the cost up even more than the premium it was three years ago. And the replacement technology certainly isn't without its issues.
But even after I painstakingly setup the perimeter wire perfectly, this bot wouldn't always follow instructions. I can't count how many times I had to retrieve the little bugger from the center of the lawn with an error saying it was outside of the perimeter wire. Yeah, that just wasn't possible.
I did my best to just work through the error messages. I convinced myself that even if I had to help the robot out a bit, it was still better than mowing the whole lawn on my own. No, I was just delaying the inevitable. I know deep down that our relationship would have to end sooner or later.
What was the straw that broke the camel's back? It was actually less about the mower itself and it was more about the concept of mowing. I finally grew sick of the task of maintaining a lawn albeit a small one. The dry summers of Northern California just don't lend themselves to lush green lawns. Even automated watering schedules via my Racchio smart irrigation system weren't cutting it. It was a waste of time and water to maintain a green lawn.
So we made the sensible decision to remove the lawn and replace it with a drought-tolerant native garden. That mostly means mulch, rocks, lots of plants, but no grass to mow. It's something that we probably should have done right when we moved in and just skipped the era of the Landroid.
And yes, I did find a new home for the robot. I was able to sell it to a new resident of our neighborhood. I was very clear with him about its shortcomings and its promise of an automated backyard utopia. He was game to accept the challenge. Maybe it just needed a fresh start with a new lawn that wasn't mine. Maybe it was more user error than anything else. Perhaps I just screwed up the boundary wire or didn't bury it deep enough, or my dog peed on it too many times, or it's just an awfully designed product.
No matter how you look at it, I've moved on. I'm sure there will be some other new gadget on the horizon that's maybe not quite fully baked but I'll give it a chance anyway. But for now, I'm very pleased with the decision to give up on the dream of a green lawn being mowed by a robot. It backfired on Donald Duck and it backfired on me too.
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next week!
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