this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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We have a pretty big back yard. Its ~90M long x ~40M wide, and aside from trees we've planted it's mostly grass and mostly flat. It's like a badly maintained football field or something.
On one side, there is a ~2M x ~1M section of mud caused by a drainage issue. It's the only muddy area in that whole space.
Yet without fail the automower will drive itself in to that space every single time it leaves the dock. Every morning I pull it out, and every afternoon its back in there. Most of the time I need to rescue it before I head to bed too.
How? It mows like the DVD logo that bounced around TV screens back in the day, just randomly hits a boundary and heads off in a random other direction yet somehow always ends up in that relatively tiny space within about 3 boundary rebounds.
I need a mathematician to work out the odds cause from my perspective its 100% at the minute.
Can't find a source but I am pretty sure the mower is doing this type of route/pattern to cut the lawns to reduce turning, which should theoretically maximise battery life.
Technically, if the mower does the whole yard everytime, there is a 100% chance of hitting the mud, regardless of the starting location. Though, I gather that the mower has failed to even mow your entire yard?
They justify "random" cutting by saying it doesn't leave wheel marks, and ensures grass is cut from different directions to prevent folding. In reality, its because GPS is super inaccurate and expensive to implement properly especially back in the day when most automowers were being designed. Now they're starting to appear with cm accuracy using differential GPS (well, RTK) but you need to throw up at least one beacon for that. In theory that allows for more efficient algorithms than "bump blindly around the yard long enough and eventually you'll have been everywhere"
My issue is that the damn thing always ends up in this tiny mud patch when in theory the random bounce should mean it only hits it every few days - not within 10 minutes of leaving the base station. There's magic at work here. DARK MAGIC. And I dont like it.