Let's upgrade cheap off-the-shelf robotic mowers to modern, smart RTK GPS based lawn mowing robots!

Overview

OpenMower

OpenMower the DIY smart robot mowerLicense: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Discord

Join the Discord server for OpenMower discussion: HERE

About the Project

⚠️ DISCLAIMER:

IF YOU ARE NOT 100% SURE WHAT YOU ARE DOING, PLEASE DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME! ASK IN DISCORD, IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS!

Project Intro Video

If you want to see a quick overview, you can check out this video:

Let's be honest: The current generation of robotic lawn mowers sucks. Basically all of these bots drive in a random direction until they hit the border of the lawn, rotate for a randomized duration and repeat. I think we can do better!

Therefore, we have disassembled the cheapest off-the-shelf robotic mower we could find (YardForce Classic 500) and were surprised that the hardware itself is actually quite decent:

  • Geared sensored brushless motors for the wheels
  • A sensored brushless motor for the mower motor itself
  • The whole construction seems robust, waterproof and all in all thought through
  • All components are connected using standard connectors, therefore upgrading the hardware is easily possible.

The bottom line is: The bot itself is surprisingly high quality and doesn't need to be changed at all. We just need some better software in there.

Project Goals

Here is a quick overview of this project's goals:

✔️ Autonomous Lawn Mowing: Obviously, the device should be able to mow the lawn automatically.

✔️ Good Safety: The device must be safe, e.g. emergency stop if lifted or crashed.

✔️ No Perimeter Wire Needed: We want to be flexible and support multiple mowing areas.

✔️ Low Cost: It should be cheaper than a mid range off-the-shelf product

✔️ Open: I want to share knowledge and enable others to build an OpenMower as well.

✔️ Nice to Look At: You should not be ashamed to have an OpenMower mowing your lawn.

✔️ Avoid Obstacles: The mower should detect obstacles and avoid them during mowing.

✔️ Rain Detection: The device should be able to detect bad weather conditions and pause mowing until they improve.

Current State

The basic mowing function finally works! As you can see in the video, map teaching and mowing work as expected. It even returns to the docking station automatically as soon as the battery gets low and continues once it's recharged.

At this point I can recommend that brave tech savvy users can build one for themselves! Since it's quite an expensive and complex project, please don't be shy and ask if you have any questions. I'm glad to help 🙂

Hardware

The first mainboard PCB is almost done. It currently looks like this:

Current State of the Robot

Hardware To-Do:

  • Low Level Firmware Implementation
    • Voltage / Current Sense
    • Emergency Stop Button tracking
    • IMU Communication
    • Rain Sensor
    • Charging State
    • Sound Module
    • UI Board Communication
    • Low Power Mode
  • ROS Hardware Interface
  • Hardware Redesign (bugs / enhancements):
    • Digial Emergency Stop Signal from Pico to xESC
    • Sound Module Pinout needs to be adapted to DFPlayer
    • XT60 Power Connector needs to be connected to main power instead of charging input

Software

The basic software is basically done; Our prototype works as intended (but is not able to avoid obstacles yet).

The software for the robot can be found in a separate repository: https://github.com/ClemensElflein/open_mower_ros

Software To-Do:

  • Mowing State Machine (Docking / Mowing, ...)
  • Path Planning
  • Obstacle Avoidance
  • App / Visualization

How You Can Help

You can help by starting an OpenMower build of your own. This helps to validate the concept and helps to create useful documentation for new users.

Additionally, you can help by starring 🌟 and watching 👀 this repository, since it will help with visibility. You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Compatible Robotic Mowers

While disassembling the bot, I wondered about its mainboard: Instead of "YardForce" it read "GForce". After checking the internet for "GForce" robots, I found that that very similar looking robotic mowers are sold under the Herkules brand. Naturally I tried to dig deeper and actually found evidence that the mainboard is manufactured by some chinese company (SUMTEC Hardware).

GForce Robot Mower Mainboard

It is therefore quite safe to assume that many robot mowers are basically the same device in a different case. This would be a huge win for the community, since this would mean that by making one of those robots smarter, we could upgrade A LOT OF ROBOTS!

Therefore it might be a good idea to start a list of compatible devices. So if you have a cheap robotic lawn mower, it would be nice of you to check, if it contains the same mainboard as ours and send me some pictures / model numbers.

More Infos

This page only contains the basic overview of the project. To follow my current development state, check out my Blog.

Patents, Local Laws, Liability

Before building a robot based on the designs published here, please make sure that you are allowed to do so in your specific regions. There may be patents and / or laws prohibiting you of doing so.

The code/schematics/PCB files are distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

This basically means: I'm just documenting a project of mine here for free and I don't have the time and resources to check that devices built using this information will be safe to use, legal to use or even work as intended. You will need technical know-how to use this project and I'm not liable for any damages your devices do to anyone or anything.

License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Feel free to use the design in your private/educational projects, but don't try to sell the design or products based on it without getting my consent first. The idea here is to share knowledge, not to enable others to simply sell my work. Thank you for understanding.

Comments
  • OpenMower is not Open Source

    OpenMower is not Open Source

    The common definition of open source is that the source code and other digital artifacts can be used for commercial purposes. The non-commercial licensing makes this project not open source. A list of resources discussing the definition of "Open Source" is given below. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has a list of approved licenses. The Creative Commons licenses that are libre/free/open are CC0, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA.

    Please consider removing the non-commercial clause in the license to make this project open source.

    If you decide to keep the non-commercial licensing, please consider renaming the project to something other than "OpenMower" as the term "Open" holds connotations of it being open source and causes confusion. Additionally, if you decide to keep the non-commercial license, please remove the "open source" project goal in the README.md file.

    For projects that aren't libre/free/open source but still wish to make their source available, a good compromise I've found is to indicate that the project has "source available" rather than specifying it is "open source".


    Open Source Initiative

    The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

    Wikipedia's entry on Open Source

    Licenses which only permit non-commercial redistribution or modification of the source code for personal use only are generally not considered as open-source licenses.

    opened by abetusk 12
  • Versioning / Branches / Releases

    Versioning / Branches / Releases

    At this point it would be nice to think about release + versioning, since it's not optimal right now.

    Current State Currently, I'm just pushing updates and we're using the latest development state. This is fine for now, because I try to only push things that are working, but in the future it might be nice to have a "stable" release.

    Goal Since the OpenMower is basically two components, the hardware and the software, it would be nice to have a versioning system which shows which hardware version works with which software version.

    Also it would also be nice to provide a packaged bundle of hardware (BOM, Gerbers,...) and software (precompiled image).

    Progress Vermut on my Discord is working on streamlining the KiCAD releases and jakub is working on streamlining software releases.

    Currently the idea for hardware is to have a GitHub action which checks DRC, packs gerbers, generates iBOM, etc. This solves the problem of people just wanting to get Gerbers + BOM to order the PCBs without getting into KiCAD. This also prevents me from forgetting to generate the artifacts.

    For the software the idea is to have a GitHub action to pack a docker image. This allows people to quickly get the software, they won't need to compile + it's easy to upgrade.

    This issue is meant for discussion about where to go from here basically.

    opened by ClemensElflein 7
  • Fixes from Vermut's 1st batch

    Fixes from Vermut's 1st batch

    • fix(soundmodule): female socket instead of male headers
    • fix(motorsensor): J10 was upside-down
    • feat(pcb): rotate J10 and move lower, soundboard pin sockets
    opened by rfvermut 6
  • Alternative to custom PCB

    Alternative to custom PCB

    Is there a possibility to remove the custom PCB and use "standard components" e.g. pi cluster ?

    This would enable more people in development.

    opened by conradkirschner 4
  • WT901 overflow issue

    WT901 overflow issue

    If the magnetic offset of the WT901 is too large, the values will overflow or clip. This way the orientation in the open mower software will be nonsense. The solution is to move the WT901's offset register in such a way that the values are in a sensible area. We should probably detect the overflow somehow and move the offsets accordingly.

    bug 
    opened by ClemensElflein 2
  • Automatic generation of bom/render/gerbers

    Automatic generation of bom/render/gerbers

    I updated the scripts, now it runs CI on every commit that does DRC/ERC failing due to ERC https://github.com/rfvermut/OpenMower/runs/7030384610?check_suite_focus=true

    Release now includes a render of a board with git tag as version on a silkscreen: https://github.com/rfvermut/OpenMower/releases/tag/v0.9.10

    also I added the script that regenerates GH pages with a navigator of all artifacts (except ibom, somehow it dislikes it) https://rfvermut.github.io/OpenMower

    opened by rfvermut 1
  • Dock reworked

    Dock reworked

    see commits for change list

    Idea behind 3.81 terminal block is to allow reusing existing orange terminals from old PCB

    Idea behild extra pin holes next to DC/DC is to connect wires to blue terminal w/o desoldering it.

    image

    opened by rfvermut 0
  • feat: tag PCB with 2 digits out of 3

    feat: tag PCB with 2 digits out of 3

    We agreed to bump MINOR when PCB changes, and bump PATCH when software changes, so in order to have same PCB versions when software is upgraded we tag PCB with v1.2.x instead of v1.2.3, v1.2.4

    opened by rfvermut 0
  • Add firmware to release process

    Add firmware to release process

    Also GH workflow refactoring to reuse artifacts

    Looks like this:

    • https://github.com/rfvermut/OpenMower/releases/tag/v0.0.108
    • https://github.com/rfvermut/OpenMower/actions/runs/2773901745
    opened by rfvermut 0
  • fix(bom): custom filter to match kicad built-in + schematic PDF

    fix(bom): custom filter to match kicad built-in + schematic PDF

    Fixes the issue when automatic KiCAD BOM (.csv) generator includes any parts that have something in Config field, but the rest of the generated files have DNFs (ibom, pick-and-place etc).

    opened by rfvermut 0
  • Gardena Mower Compatibility

    Gardena Mower Compatibility

    Hi fellow robot mower owners,

    I was wondering if anyone has tried converting a Gardena mower with this project.

    Some Gardena mowers have a slot for a smart module, and I am wondering if that could be a way into controlling it without replacing hardware.

    opened by JasperMC 0
  • Is there a way to adjust blade height?

    Is there a way to adjust blade height?

    Actually this is more of a question or a feature request. So is there a way to adjust blade height? In my yard there are places that I would like blade to be lower and places where it should not be as low or it might hit something Also this would be a great feature combined with other feature requests, while having different patterns in place one could make all kinds of nice patterns like on a football fields. Pic for reference

    opened by vipasane 1
  • Add

    Add "Getting started" section to README

    It's not obvious for a newcomer to click the "Wiki", so for ease of access, I propose including a link to the relevant Wiki section that guides those interested forward.

    opened by lightheaded 0
  • Enable Low Level Emergency Deactivation (Button)

    Enable Low Level Emergency Deactivation (Button)

    Problem Statement: Since the Mainboard of the Robotic Mower has been substituted the emergency Stop button functionality is assumed not to be working. This part is one of the most important safety measures beside the Gyroscope based deactivation of the mower, I propose to integrate a low-level emergency switch which deactivates the Motors.

    Expected Behavior:

    • If Emergency Button is pressed the Robot stops mowing instantly and requires manual reset
    • The low Level Controller (PiCO or similar) requires an reinitialization routine from Raspberry in order to restart operation
    • Saving the location and time of event on storage

    Proposed approaches:

    • Hardware based Kill-switch cutting the motor driver voltages
    • Software based ISR listening on the Emergency Button Pin and actively deactivates motors
    opened by endoskop27 0
Releases(latest)
Owner
Clemens Elflein
Entrepreneur, Loves Software Engineering, Hardware Design, Robots and Open Source.
Clemens Elflein
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