Actually - here on the northern fringe - we have none such animals! Only lots of weeds! Perfect for automated mowing without harming small friends.
Designing a robot mower has been on my list of stuff to do for a while.
I’m interested in the mechanical design of it, and also (a little less) by the electronic design part. But the coding part really doesn’t interest me at all so if some kind of firmware already exists that would be nice.
Is there some kind of Marlin of the mower?
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There is ardumower.
I think people have also adapted ardupilot for land use.
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I have a kit to build this one with the RTX receiver and transmitter. I have some other projects ahead of this one, but I think this will be a lot of fun and hopefully do a lot of the mowing for me!
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Here’s one that uses ardupilot, just came across my feed.
Of all the projects, what I have not yet seen are:
- Platform using a solar panel without battery
- Cutting grass with something other than spinning blade
I’m finding readily available aluminum-frame 100W solar panels for about $100 that are approximately 3 feet in size.
Rather than going for both solar and scissors, if I have a bit of extra power doing nothing, it might make sense to go for the spinning blade, at least to start. Bumpers and random navigation is enough for the MVP. Then beyond that, the improvements could take multiple directions for navigation, efficiency/speed, or maybe computer vision for 
avoidance 
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What type of blade? Weed wacker strimmer line, or spinning LR3 cut Steel/Alu blade, or something else?
Planning to start with a drone motor, or, mod/butcher an existing commonly available popular strimmer (easier for others to join in, collab and replicate)?
I admire the goal of self contained solar mowing solution. But I already have a 20v Dewalt strimmer, and bunch of rechargeable batteries mostly sitting around doing nothing. For me, ideally, those existing assets would be modded/automated to maximize their utility value.
Can’t help but think about this topic every time I mow.
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Solar only wouldn’t have enough ass behind it to spin a blade, and drive at the same time.
Couple weeks ago we did an event here in Boston at our beloved Fenway Park, and during setup they were preparing the field for the next day game.
And we spotted what looks like a Husqvarna robot mower.
No way! That is cool, they must be better than I imagined.
Slap some wheels and a capacitor on one of these.
Make it a mico mower. Solar panel, capacitor bank. Every time it gets enough juice, it runs around for a few minutes.
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The lawn Barber®
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Heh, so you’d have a solar powered sickle bar mower.
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Anyone else have a spare EGO hedge trimmer lying around, and a need want for automated mowing?
There was a recent safety recall, they sent a replacement. So now I’m left with a “deactivated” one that has many useful parts…
I have a neighbor with a Husqvarna robot mower. He says once a week he runs around and edges and trims the yard, but the robot takes care of the rest of it.
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For Makers with circular yard/lawn and great homeowner/health insurance…
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I don’t know about 3p printing one but a more affordable conversion of a cheap robomower to RTK would be cool.
Can you be more specific about this? In particular, what is “cheap”? Like $1000?
No cheap like $200
I found this video a really useful guide to what RTK is and how it works (and how cheap it’s got)
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Wow, nice! 
Lowest I found on Amazon in US is $350 but still that’s quite a bit less than I expected.