With their new robotic lawn mower, Bosch wants you to put your feet up while a small, green robot does all the hard yard work.
The German multinational engineering and electronics company, Bosch, has developed a more intelligent and efficient way of mowing the front lawn. This robotic electric lawn mower will mow a lawn without the need for direct supervision.
The Bosch Indego is said to cut up to 1,000 square meters at a time, (approx a quarter of an acre). Using the provided wiring, the owner must define the perimeter of the lawn in order to help the Indego understand the boundaries of the given property.
The robotic lawn mower is programmed to automatically avoid obstacles it may encounter along its path such as large rocks, sprinklers, lawn decorations, toys left out by kids and other obtrusive objects. The Bosch Indego then automatically figures out how to adjust its mowing pattern in order to avoid these obtrusions.
The electric lawn mower can cover roughly 200 square meters every 20 minutes. Once it’s low on electrical energy, the Bosch Indego will automatically return to its charging pad and begin recharging its lithium-ion battery. After spending and hour and a half to recharge the battery, the mower returns to the process of mowing the lawn.
Using the charging pad as its initial navigation point, the mower returns to the exact spot where it stopped mowing and cuts the lawn in straight lines to avoid missing any small patches of grass.
According to the German engineering company, this method of cutting the grass is four times more effective than any other robotic lawn mower.
By contrast, some other robotic mowers move more or less randomly all over the place, the idea being that they’ll eventually get the whole lawn done.
The Bosch Indego is also able to sense “no-mow” surfaces such as gravel, pavement, and tile while other automatic electric mowers must be programmed with the location of such areas, or require them to be cordoned off with wire.
In addition to its quiet, linear operation, the Bosch Indego mulches grass clippings during the process and does not expel harmful exhaust like the traditional gasoline-powered mower.
The Indego can be set to automatically head out on its lawn-cutting duties every other day or as often as the owner wishes.
Should anyone try and steal your automatic electric mower off its charging station or during operation, the Bosch Indego has a built-in alarm that will sound if it is moved a significant distance from its charging pad. Its alarm code can be updated on the internet, should you need to legitimately move it to another home.
According to estimates from Bosch, the Indego electric lawn mower is ten times cheaper to operate than a standard gasoline-powered mower. However, the extremely expensive $2,040 price tag will definitely turn people away for the near future. The robotic lawn mower will be sold within northern Europe during 2012 and expand to larger markets over 2013.
