Glenn Johansson wrote:
>
> Why not just place a powerful laser in horizontal position one inch above
 ground, and let it circle over the lawn and burn off the straws once every
 night. It may be expensive but it's reliable. Then a PIC connected to an Iomega
 could be used to control a sprinkler system to put out any fire.
>
>
>
> Glenn
> Sweden
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From:   Jack Warren [SMTP:warren@UNITRODE.COM]
> Sent:   Tuesday, November 18, 1997 2:49 PM
> To:     PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Subject:        Re: Robot Lawnmowers
>
> Several years ago there was a series of articles in Radio-Electronics (I
> think?!?!?) which was a do-it-yourself autonomous lawn mower.  It used a
> series of split IR emitter/detector pairs to sense the "length" of the grass
> blades.  The steering mechanism attempted to keep half of the IR pairs in the
> uncut grass.
>
> Using this method, you mow around all of the obsticles in the yard, then go to
> auto mode and let the mower do it's thing.  I'm not sure what it did when it
> got done...

Could be a good idea... But have you ever seen a totally flat
garden of golf court? What about my garden's trees and my roses? :-)

Gael