Autonomous / robot mower for orchards (big or small)

General Fruit Growing
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Is anyone using anything like that or seeing any affordable options coming along? I see the little robot mowers for yards and wonder if something is coming along that can avoid obstacles/trees… and that would be affordable and cover some ground beyond a small manicured yard.

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HI John:

Sorry for raining on your parade but robot mower and affordable are 3 words that do not go together… I have about 6 hours of medium-sized mower tractor every week or so to do and I have already explored the possibility of a robot mower… Conclusion? Lottery tickets are your best friends… when considering getting one of those…

Marc

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Definitely hours of mowing could be spent doing something else.
Is that a riding lawn mower or a tractor? To me a tractor has some horsepower, and medium size might be 50-100hp (depending on a person’s perspective), but the term tractor got a little overused at some point.

I agree that even the simple lawn robots are crazy expensive!

This DIY raspberry pi mower project is interesting, but doesn’t quite scale to the level of an orchard. There are other ideas like this.
http://pimowbot.tgd-consulting.de/

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My yard is too much of a rocky, bumpy, stick-filled mess for a robot mower.

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Oh that’s very intriguing! I love all my raspberry pi stuff, really an amazing little computer. I use them as temperature/humidity monitors, surveillance cameras, an old video game emulator, now I can’t wait to try to recruit one to do the yardwork…

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at my age I need to use a simple push 3.5 horse mower to do the half acre fruit orchard rocky lot. Exercise is paramount.

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Duct tape a machete to a roomba and you’re good to go.

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I have been wondering the same thing. A robot mower to do my orchard. Someone is using a robot mower down about 5 minutes from me. When I drive by I see it cutting the grass along the roadside. There is a little sign up saying to watch out for the robot mower being in use. It would be great to have one that is efficient enough to use.

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Just saw this interesting story in Wired about the future of robot farming and thought of this thread:

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