If you’re tired of mowing the lawn, iRobot, at long last, might have a solution.
The company on Wednesday unveiled the i Robot Terra Robot Mower, a lawn mower that you can send out on grass and let it do all the work for you. And like iRobot’s other products, including its Roomba robot vacuums and Braava robot mops, the Terra can be controlled from the company’s iRobot Home app. IRobot said that the app will let you adjust the lawn mower’s deck to clip your grass at the desired height.
In an interview with the Associated Press, iRobot CEO Colin Angle said that his company has been working on the robot mower for more than a decade. On two occasions, he said that the company gave up, believing that actually making a robot lawn mower was impossible. The company dealt with a host of issues with satellite-based GPS and lasers to direct its movement that derailed the robot mower’s development.
Now, though, iRobot says it’s figured it out. And in a statement, the company said that the Terra has a technology called Imprint Smart Mapping that allows it to know where it is on your lawn and cut it in straight, back-and-forth lines. The lawn mower can do it all without boundary wires to tell it where it is on your lawn.
Looking ahead, iRobot plans to launch the Terra mower in Germany in 2019 and bring it to the U.S. In 2020. This year, however, iRobot will allow some customers to join a beta program in the U.S. To test out the Terra stateside. Pricing and exact availability will be announced at a later time.