Design and Path Planning of Autonomous Solar Lawn Mower

Abstract Current conventional lawn mowers have the following drawbacks; high initial costs, increasing engine noise levels, high operating costs due to high fuel consumption rates, the need to implement perimeter wires across the desired lawn mowing field, and high exhaustion of the operator in the long operating time. Hence, the need for a system that can achieve the same cutting effect of the existing lawn mowers with little or no operator’s fatigue, minimized noise pollution and running cost has risen. In present work, design of an autonomous solar lawn mower, a robotic vehicle that cut grass automatically with little human intervention, is discussed. The robotic vehicle is powered by Lithium-Ion batteries and depend on solar power delivered from a solar base station for charging the batteries. The mechanical design of the vehicle is flexible with the ability to control the height of the vehicle during grass mowing. Differential steering, with the implementation of multiple sensors is presented for obstacle avoidance. Also, a Raspberry Pi microcontroller for the image processing application through a camera is used for path planning. Furthermore, a solar based station structure is designed for charging the robotic vehicle batteries with minimized running cost, utilization of renewable energy source, no health hazards, not having any effect on the environment, and human’s effort and time are saved.