Robotic Lawnmower Monitoring via Beacon Setup and Path Teaching
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing autonomous robotic lawnmowers face challenges in efficiently determining their location on a lawn and optimizing beacon placement, leading to suboptimal mowing performance and user control over grass height and navigation paths.
Innovation Solution
A user device provides a visual interface to recommend beacon locations and grass height settings, allowing users to select paths for the lawnmower, enhancing the lawnmower's ability to determine its location and navigate efficiently, while also enabling users to monitor and control the lawnmower's operations.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Extent of automation
If the autonomous robotic lawnmower uses beacon placement to determine its location, then the lawnmower can navigate autonomously, but the user lacks control over beacon locations and grass height settings
Solution Approach 1:
The system presents recommended beacon locations and grass height settings to the user before the actual mowing operation begins. The user can review and adjust these pre-calculated recommendations, combining automated preparation with user control during the setup phase.
Solution Approach 2:
A user interface acts as an intermediary between the autonomous lawnmower system and the user. This interface allows the user to view recommended parameters, adjust settings, and provide feedback, thereby maintaining user control while working with an autonomous system.
2Reliability
If the lawnmower autonomously determines its location using beacons, then navigation is possible, but beacon placement optimization is insufficient
Solution Approach 1:
The system provides feedback to the user about the recommended beacon locations and their impact on mowing efficiency. The user can see how different beacon placements affect navigation reliability and adjust the configuration accordingly to optimize productivity.
Solution Approach 2:
The system allows dynamic adjustment of beacon-related parameters such as beacon locations, quantities, and detection thresholds. By optimizing these parameters based on the specific lawn environment, the system improves both location determination reliability and mowing efficiency.
3Ease of operation
If the user interface presents multiple lawn shape representations with recommended beacon locations, then user control over setup is improved, but the device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The user interface presents different lawn shape representations with locally optimized beacon recommendations for each shape type. Each representation provides context-specific guidance tailored to that particular lawn configuration, making the complex information more manageable and user-friendly.
Data Source
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AI summary
A user device, such as a smartphone or a tablet computer, can provide a user with information pertaining to operations of an autonomous robotic lawnmower to assist the user with monitoring the operations of the robotic lawnmower and with setting up the autonomous robotic lawnmower. For example, the user device can present example lawn shapes and recommended locations of beacons suitable for these lawn shapes, can indicate the quantity of beacons detected by the autonomous robotic lawnmower, can be used to establish a region on a lawn where the autonomous robotic lawnmower performs a particular behavior, can be used to select a grass height that the autonomous robotic lawnmower cuts the lawn, and can be taught a particular path to take when returning to a docking station to charge the autonomous robotic lawnmower.