IEEE Future Directions
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Joe Jones was one of the researchers in the team that invented Roomba, actually Joe was the one providing the vision of a robot that was simple enough and affordable enough to be used in a home as vacuum cleaner. Roomba is probably one of the most successful robot ever, having sold more than 15 million pieces and keeping improving its features and performances since its introduction in 2002.
Now Joe is seeking funding on Kickstarter to develop Tertill, a robot, similar in size to Roomba, that would take care of weeds in your garden.
It is designed to be completely autonomous. It runs on a battery that is recharged through an on board solar panel. It will work for a hour and then it will rest in the Sun to recharge its battery.
Like Roomba it has a “sense” of space, which means it will learn the shape of your garden and will develop a plan to go around looking for weeds to cut them (it cannot uproot them but since it will be at work every day it will keep them at bay). It is smart enough to not cut your darling plants and flower.
Most importantly it has just one button you have to push to activate it, and once is enough. From that moment on it will take care of weeding your garden.
What I like is the idea of having a completely autonomous robot doing a specific chore and the simplicity to operate it. I guess this is a first in a long series of “things” that will progressively become aware to the point of being effective in doing a specific chore. Interestingly, if you have a bigger garden that would require more than a hour per day for weeding you can drop more than one Tertill there and they will discover their presence by themselves coordinating the job also in terms of being active in different time of the day so that you will only have one of them roaming about.
