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Crop Circles Have a New Maker- The “Toadi” Autonomous AI Driven Lawnmower

It’s Saturday morning any you have to do the lawn. As the day goes by your significant other keeps looking at you like when are you going to do it. The day goes by, and still nothing. At dinner they ask you, “What about the lawn?” You respond, “Toadi’s on it.”
Toadi Autonomous Lawnmower 8 photos
Photo: Toadi
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Aside from the question of “Who the hell is Toadi?”, and the possible “What’s he or it got to do with our lawn?”, there's really no reason to fuss about the lawn anymore. Toadi is just an AI powered lawn mower.

Yup, it’s as simple as that. You can chill with your other half and enjoy your Mimosas while watching this little fella clean up your yard. But how it does the whole grass-cutting business is really what makes all the difference for this little fella.

You probably picked up the ‘autonomous’ bit from the title, and yes, this little trinket is fully autonomous. It does this through the use of camera which uses an identification interface to recognize objects and whether or not they need cutting. If you’ve ever seen Terminator, I would compare this camera to the scanner those robots have as their eyes. Might seem a bit scary, but this little R2D2 won’t even reach your toes, so you can relax. To top things off, this system even includes a night vision ability that let’s Toadi cut straight through the night.

Toadi Autonomous Lawnmower
Photo: Toadi
But just having some special camera isn’t enough to do this primitive chore for you. It also requires an AI. And an AI it does include. On the first day of operations, Toadi will not mow your lawn, but rather map out your yard. With this map, Toadi is able to identify flower beds, slopes, fence lines, and even bushes and fallen fruits, plus a number of other large stationary objects. With each one, the EV will adjust its trajectory, power output, as is the case during a hill climb, and even knows if it should be cutting or not. Oh, and all this is done with no perimeter cable.

As for charging, once the lithium ion battery is tapped, Toadi will seek its charger. This charging station takes current directly from your wall socket, so there’s no need to worry about adapting your home for this device.

As for the materials that went into building this indestructible ground drone, we find plastic!? Yup, 100% recycled plastics go into making the outer shell for both the mower and charging station. Well that’s friggin nice, seeing as how we have a plastics problem world-wide.

But plastic isn’t all it has. A Final coating made of nano-ceramic gives the whole system all-weather proofing. Even an internal heating system exists so that everything works even in cold weather. Oh, and it’s even waterproof, meaning it can mow though puddles and wet grass.

Toadi Autonomous Lawnmower
Photo: Toadi
Here’s a twist to that. Imagine a snow-shovel on the front of the Toadi for winter season. Honestly, somebody will definitely think of doing this. Maybe even tweak some configurations to get some extra juice out of it. Who knows?

As for the actual cutting, this mower doesn’t just cut a patch of grass once, twice, or even three times. Tadi will actually cut the same area using a technique called mulching. It will cut a layer then come back and recut and recut and recut, until it sends you a picture of its proud work. Yeah, you get a photo at the end that shows you what your yard looks like.

If hanging out and saving 2 hours from your day every Saturday, for a total of eight hours a month, 96 hours a year or four days isn’t enough. Here's what you save in 50 years using a Toadi. 200 days. Enough to learn a new language.

But If you want one now, you’re still going to have to wait a bit, as this project is funding on Kickstarter right now, but production announced for November.
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About the author: Cristian Curmei
Cristian Curmei profile photo

A bit of a nomad at heart (being born in Europe and raised in several places in the USA), Cristian is enamored with travel trailers, campers and bikes. He also tests and writes about urban means of transportation like scooters, mopeds and e-bikes (when he's not busy hosting our video stories and guides).
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