Friendly Robotics Not So Friendly

It seems to happen quite often these days. A product breaks down which you have only had for a much shorter time than you expect an item to last. This time, it was our lawn mower. I am out mowing the lawn, and it spins down. Only to never start again. I call my husband. "You aren't going to believe it". Him: "what"? Me: "the mower just died". Him: "but we just bought that thing". Me: " I know. I will hunt down the receipt and see what we can do about it". After rummaging through hundreds of receipts I find it. 14 months old. I am relieved to know the warranty is for 24 months, but now we are left without a mower in the middle of summer when the lawn grows at an insane rate. Then the annoyingly familiar cycle begins. Are they really going to honor the warranty? How much it going to cost us to ship it to wherever. Once we get it fixed how long till it breaks down again. Maybe we should think about buying something new while we are trying to get the old one fixed. After all, we have learned all to well that it never hurts to have a backup.

My husband had been sending me links from gadget websites for weeks about how cool the robomowers were. Very neat indeed. Though at the time we already had a working mower, and I couldn't get past lawn dismorphia. Granted, I am the one doing the lawn work, but somewhere in the back of my mind I think " if I go automated on this, it will just keep going until I am laying on the couch like jaba the hut with machines doing everything for me". In reality, I have a million other projects to do. Saving a few hours on lawn work a week would make those other projects actually move a little faster. So... I finally softened to the idea. We spent about a week marinating the idea. Looking at feedback. Combing the web for people who actually owned one, and were satisfied enough that we placed the purchase through Amazon.

A couple of days after placing the order we start to get positively giddy about the machine. Each day my husband was checking UPS to see when it is suppose to arrive. Finally it does on a Monday the July 26th. Yippee!




We spend the better part of a day laying the ground wire. We get our first mow in by the next weekend. At this point we think "hey... this is great". Did a much better job than we expected. It was very quiet. What a relief! All goes well for the next 2 weeks.


Then it happens. Soon after setting the mower to go on August 19th I notice when it goes in reverse it is making a squeaking sound. At first I didn't think much of it, and figured dew on the lawn was causing it to make a little noise. After a few cycles in reverse though, it starts to bother me. After sitting out and watching it for about 10 minutes I realize the thing is listing, and when I shut it off and look at it I notice a groove has been worn in the wheel. I email my husband who says " this may not be a problem - pull the battery and see if the wheels have slipped their height setting". I pull the battery, and put it into the higher setting, set the battery back in, and the chassis slumps to where it is sitting. Just slightly higher than where it was wearing a groove in the wheel on the lower setting.
Right side (good) Note the cleareance between the wheel and the wheelwell

Left side (bad):

Crap. It just figures. I look through email and alert my husband that we are three weeks into the 30 day period in which most companies let you return defective items for exchange. At this point I am super annoyed because while we thought we would have to repair it before the 24 month warranty, we didn't expect a failure at 3 weeks. I call the distributor in Texass, and gives me the local repair shops. Now, when I say local, I mean an hour in each direction local. I already know that it will cost around 50 bucks to ship it to a repair shop. It is a heavy oversized item. Now, If we had the mower for more than 3 weeks, it wouldn't be that big of a deal. But now we faced with a huge hassle or another 50 bucks for an item we spent over 650 bucks for and have only had 3 weeks. And have treated extremely gently.

My husband calls the distributor back the next day to put some firm pressure on them to send us an RMA, and give us an exchange. No luck. He sends me email -"they don't do exchanges - ever, but they claim it will be fixed free of charge". At this point I am in disbelief. It doesn't state that on their website. Honestly, that might have swayed us into not buying the mower.

The more annoying thing is the distributor in Texas made absolutely zero effort to make us happy, apologize for our inconvience, and frankly wasn't even pleasant to either of us on the phone. Some might think the distributor was merely reflecting the attitude we were projecting. I assure you, neither my husband and I are the type to stomp up and down being loud and yelling at people. We are reasonable people. Firm, but reasonable.

The little ones - they understand.

Today I set about cleaning up the garage. My freak out level was on stun. After 5 months working pretty much every day on the Canton house, the garage had started to close in on me. I couldn't find anything. I could barely walk in there without tripping. And... it's pretty amazing how much technology can become obsolete in 5 months. All that crap needed to go.

The day started out pretty uneventfully. We stuck out Mow to cut the front lawn and went on about our business deciding what could be donated, or just thrown away.

Now, I've talked a few times about the reaction we get from Mow. I rarely post about it anymore. When I'm in my kitchen and Mow is going - I'll look out the window and see someone stopped in the middle of the street watching it. It just makes me smile. I can't explain it. I'm still surprised when people stop. We've lived here a couple of years now, and I just naturally think everyone has seen it by now. It pretty much is not blog worthy anymore.

Anyway.. I'm digressing. Cleaning out the garage - bla, bla, bla.

I've got my back to the street, and I hear in the tiniest voice "something, something.. rooobot"? Which snaps me into what is happening out there. I don't see anyone - but I can see a tiny red flag. The ones that people put on scooters and bikes so you don't run their asses over with cars.

So, I step to the side of the Chrysler and see a man on a tandem bike with this young boy. The little kid was fascinated, and he was asking his dad if it was a robot. This interested me a great deal because the boy was young. Really young. But, he seemed really articulate for his age. And yes.. I get to comment on a 4 year being articulate. So, I asked the kid how old he was. Because clearly, he was super smart. When he replied that he was 4 - I became fully engaged.

I'm all "you are 4 and you know this is a robot"? He replied that he did. He dad and I started talking about Mow, and that his son had robots at home. At random points when I was talking to the dad, the kid would pick up on something and enter the conversation. Like when I was telling his dad that Mow didn't do everything like edge trimming, but it was nice to have when things were busy. The kid asked "the robot doesn't do everything?" His dad told the boy "you know the machine that makes (this noise - simulating the edger noise) it doesn't do that". The kid immediately understood. He was 4.. did I mention that?

I was totally floored at how well the kid grasped the idea of robots in general. It was like he was a little adult. At 4. I loved the whole exchange.

Mow goes under the knife this weekend.

We are now ten years into robotic mowers. Then.......nothing.

When I talked to the guys at the iRobot booth at CES, they seemed lawsuit shy about robotic mowers. So, most likely this technology will wither on the vine.

I've loved our robotic mowers for years. Well - the first few years. I mean, this was great technology 10 years ago. Now I want to beat it to death with a very large stick.

The way when you drive it to a lawn area, it takes you nine days. 90 Year olds' walk faster than you can drive this thing. Hulk smash!@

The way it's a tethered joystick to make it move.

Or the way it can never really find its way around. Five minutes once I watched it drive in a circle. Or the way it gets OCD about one area of the lawn. Completely neglecting the other parts.

How the bumpers cause it to dramatically change direction. Or how you have to hold down two buttons to manual mow. At this point I almost hate everything about it.

So this weekend.....we hack it. We can rebuild him. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.

Or we could completely fuck it up and burn it down.

A Robomower Rant

As you may have guessed, we at the Snarkolepsy household are early adopters of technology, especially home robotics. Roombas, Scoobas, Lawn mowers, gutter cleaners, we've got 'em.

And I'm generally pretty forgiving of version 1.0 of any product. I accept that the first version is going to have issues. But I expect version 2.0 of the product to be noticeably better. e.g. the current generation of Roomba is noticeably better than the earlier versions.

Which brings us to robot lawn mowers, specifically the Friendly Robotics robomowers.

We initially purchased an RL550 model (which we named "Moe") back in 2004 (read about it here)

When Moe died in 2008, we upgraded to a later model (an RL850, named "Shemp")

Sadly, there's no improvement in the usability of the later model. It works exactly the same as the previous one, it just costs more.

The biggest issue is manual mowing. There are always places where the mower misses spots b/c of lawn obstacles (trees, walls, ditches, etc), and you have to go back and drive the mower manually around these spots to get them. The problem is the mechanism provided to pilot the mower manually is something that looks like an Xbox controller. You have to use a joystick/thumbpad to steer while pushing two other buttons simultaneously to mow. No one who has ever tried to do this can possibly think it's a good idea. This stupid controller gives me a hand cramp every time I have to use it.

I'm not convinced that the people at Friendly Robotics actually ever use the product they sell, b/c otherwise they would have fixed this stupid system before releasing new models.

And all the other robot-mower makers use a similar system too (some kind of remote control joystick)

Hey Robot Mower makers - you know what would be better? Handle bars! Just like a regular lawnmower. When I have to run it manually, just let me use it like a regular mower.

I'm starting to think these articles are clickbait.

Meet Tally: The Grocery Stocking Robot About To Eradicate 1,000's Of Minimum Wage Jobs.

I really get frustrated every time I read one of these articles. People all of a sudden think robots and A.I. is this magical thing that is lurking right behind them. I personally think that we are in a robot and A.I. bubble. That's right. Bubble. 

Will robotics take "some" jobs?  Sure. But people think this is coming faster than it is and the bloggers are just creating fake news.

For example - OSH (Orchard Supply Hardware) rolled out one of these types of bots along with Lowes getting close to a year ago, and do you know how many of these I've seen in real life at the store? ZERO point ZERO.

These things are freaking novel when you first see them. But even every single conference I go to has one of them at their conference centers or hotels. They are always sitting idle. Robots don't always do things better than humans. That is just bullshit. People don't fully understand how complicated this technology is and so they just freak out.

I had TWO robotics lawn mowers and frankly I want to dedicate them the technology museum. I mow the lawn the old fashion way.

These articles are literally written by people who have never seen one of these in real life or interacted with one. And as someone who has - these stories are hype! Robots are generally SLOW. Everyone can do stuff faster than a typical robot. For grocery stocking - I bet not being quick kills this.

No one could have seen this coming.

From Gizmodo.

"LawnBott, the $2,750 robot which announced itself as your loyal automated lawn mower—capable of cutting 33,000 square feet of grass in a single charge—has revealed its true face: it wants to cut humans to pieces. Actually, just stupid humans, but the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Kyodo America have decided to "recall them immediately."

Apparently, one of the owners lifted the mower from the ground while it was still on and "suffered minor lacerations from the moving blade."

It is amazing it took this long for someone to get injured from one of the Kyoto America Lawnbots. I blogged about this machine way back in Oct. 06. Here.

Where I said " As you can see, it also has a fairly obvious safety vulnerability. More concerning is an image on this site which shows you how far off the ground this machine gets when it is doing steep terrain."

I hope this doesn't halt the progression of robotic lawnmowers. After four years our Friendly Robotics machine "Mow" as we like to call him - is starting to show signs of robotic stress and age. We were thinking we were going to need to replace him soon. It sucks to have so few options. Especially since Friendly Robotics has struggled since it's inception. Mow has been more reliable than any of the iRobot machines I've owned have been. I hope some company comes in to fill the void.

Squirrels are evolving.

It's been a while since I've posted any videos where you could actually tell if I was the one talking or not. So here ya go. Now you don't have to wonder.

Mr S.'s old shoes usually get tossed outside for slippies. He's not crazy about it, but this is where I use them to mow the lawn or take things to the trash. But I guess the squirrels have figured out they can take stuff from them for their nests. And they aren't shy about it!