Gardening in the New Millennium

Robots at the Cutting Edge

We may be a few decades away from Rosie, the Bronx-accented android who cleaned up after the Jetsons. But there's no question that the age of the helpful household robot is dawning.

The Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, which caroms around a room looking like a demon-possessed bath scale, has sold more than a million units to date worldwide. It has even become a recurring character on the Fox sitcom "Arrested Development."

Then there's Clocky, an MIT student's alarm-clock prototype actually being considered for production, which jumps from your nightstand and rolls away when you hit the snooze button -- forcing you to get out of bed to shut it off. Hit the snooze button again, and Clocky wheels off to a new hiding place. (Thanks, MIT. Don't you people have more important things to do?)

Now comes the Robomower RL 1000: an automaton that, without supervision, will trim your lawn for you -- tirelessly and dependably if a tad inefficiently. Its makers are betting that an $1,800 price isn't too steep for homeowners who want to say goodbye to yardwork's most tedious task.

The RL 1000 is the most up-to-date incarnation of a mower developed by Friendly Robotics, a company founded in the early 1990s by a pair of former Israeli F-16 fighter pilots. One was an engineer with a lifelong interest in robots; the other was a businessman skilled in raising capital. They began selling the first Robomowers in 1994. Today the grass-hungry gizmos are sold in more than two dozen countries .

A recent demonstration at the Frederick offices of http://www.mastergardening.com/ , an online dealer of gardening and landscape equipment, illustrated how the machine goes about its mission.

To keep the device from mowing every yard on the block, a thin wire is pegged close to the ground around the perimeter of a property. (Eventually grass will grow over wires and pegs, protecting and concealing them.) When switched on, the Robomower reads a signal from the wire and registers the boundaries of the yard. Then it starts moving in a roughly triangular pattern, changing directions when it reaches the perimeter wire or bumps into a tree, a birdbath, a stray football left behind by neighborhood kids -- until every square foot of the lawn has been, somewhat haphazardly, cut. Those partial to tidy straight mow marks may not be satisfied.

Because its movement is basically mindless and random, the Robomower can take two to three times longer than would a human being. But that's time the owner can spend doing something other than panting and wheezing beneath a hot sun.

The RL 1000 improves upon its predecessor, the RL 850, thanks to the addition of a timer that can be preset. Program the Robomower to do its thing, say, every Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. Until that instant the device will stay in its docking station, charging its battery and awaiting the fulfillment of its electronic destiny. When Wednesday afternoon comes around, it will dislodge from the docking station -- emitting a brief audio track of martial-sounding drums and a peppy bugle fanfare -- and start cutting. When it runs low on juice, the RL 1000 will zip back to home base for a fill-up, and then resume cutting until the job is completed.

At 80-plus pounds, the Robomower's bulk is its own best theft deterrent, but it also has a feature that allows it to be turned on only after a four-digit code has been entered . It's no louder than a rotary sprinkler, so it can run at night and not annoy the neighbors. Blade settings are adjustable, and cut grass is converted to a super-fine mulch that decomposes quickly, helping to fertilize the lawn.

It can even cut on a slope without flipping over, provided the grade is no steeper than 15 degrees. "If a slope is currently being cut with a walk-behind," as the manufacturer puts it, "the Robomower will handle it fine."

Almost all Robomower sales in this country come from the Internet, says Ames Tiedeman of Systems Trading Corp., the Robomower's North American distributor. (Two such vendors are at http://www.probotics.com/ and http://www.robomower.us .) He notes that the robot's typical American buyer is a male earning somewhere between $50,000 and $80,000 a year.