UIUC and John Deere partner to build robot lawn mower

The University of Illinois and John Deere have teamed up to take “mow the lawn” off of your to-do list. A University student and two faculty members recently built a prototype for a robotic lawn mower, and John Deere is helping them improve their product to bring it to a store near you. The lawn mower operates similarly to Roomba, the autonomous robot floor vacuum. 

Writes Chicago Inno: “By equipping the Tango lawn mower with the university’s omnidirectional-vision-based system, the team at UIUC is helping the device better navigate a plot of land by making cleaner, straighter lines and noticing things like rocks and other obstructions. The project, which was presented last month at the IEEE International Conference for Robotics and Automation, is nearing completion and is currently being tested at the John Deere Technology Innovation Center and in John Deere employees’ yards, according to the university.”

While there are other robot lawn mowers currently in development, the lawn mower from John Deere and the University of Illinois is the only model that does not require the user to install boundary wires that tell the robot where to move.