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Yard Work Companion |
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Idea Name:
Yard Work Companion
Overview:
Outdoors buggy that helps with a variety of yard work chores
Concepts/Skills:
This guy is basically limitless in my mind right now so who knows.
It'll start by just being a robot that can drive over my lawn and some reasonable obstacles like the edge between my
sidewalk and grass, and driveway and grass. He'll need some initial goal seeking or random driving/obstacle avoidance.
Then I'll build some sort of RF or IR beacon that he'll try to approach but keep a certain distance from.
If I get even near that much skill, then I'll be quite satisfied. An additonal skill that might be attainable is
building a body that's strong enough to carry a 5-gallon bucket of dirt. Most of my other robots are non-loadbearing.
Description:
This would be a work horse. He'll follow me around the yard and help me do stuff. One thing he can do
is carry a water bottle, and even cooler, he could drive over to the hose and refill the bottle. He'd need the ability to know when he was "hungry" (low battery)
and then tell me so either I could feed him, or I could give him permission to feed himself. The latter would mean I'd ahve to also build in the ability for him
to feed himself, which might include navigating to the recharging station and then hooking up. He'd need to be able to play music, really cool would be
if he had a wireless network connection so he could stream music from my PC inside. Something that would be really cool would be if he could carry a bucket and some
tools. When I'm pulling weeds out of the garden its a pain to crawl around and keep moving my bucket and tools, so he could follow me and I'd always have my stuff.
Mostly I'm talking about a 5-gallon bucket and some clippers and a hand shovel, so I don't really think the weight will be an issue.
If I'm really ambitious, then I'd make it carry my 60-gallon bucket but that's really heavy when filled with grass or leaves, so I doubt I'm interested in spending
that kind of dough on steel body (but that might be fun because I'd probably use it as an excuse to learn how to do welding) and powerful motors and batteries.
He'd need to be rugged because of the terrain (typical suburban surroundings, grass, driveway, sidewalks and dog). He'll also need to be water resistant to a degree so
he doesnt die if he goes in mud or if it starts raining and I don't bring him inside fast enough, or if his faucet coupler for refilling my water bottle is sloppy.
He'll need to be able to follow me around, which may mean PIR but that can be fooled by passers-by and the sun, or maybe an RF transmitter I wear on my boot that he tries
keep a certain distance away from. As I'm thinking of modules and how I'd tackle construction, this is probably where I'd start, with just a guy who's strong enough to drive
on my grass and keep his distance. As always, he'll need to either become friends with the dog (rather than lunch for the dog) or he'll need to be strong enough to
withstand crushing jaws (or mabye have a way to fight back like R2-D2 when he zaps the Ewoks so they'll keep their distance).
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