The OpenMower is a Raspberry Pi and ArduSimple based robotic lawn mower that you can build yourself

YouTuber Clemens Elflein has designed OpenMower, a smart robot lawnmower that can navigate without a perimeter wire. This sets the device apart from many existing robot lawn mowers, such as the Flymo EasiLife 250 GO Robotic Lawn Mower.

The OpenMower localizes itself using RTK GPS, allowing for an efficient mow. The GPS also allows you to set multiple zones, such as a front and back garden, which the mower can move between automatically.

While the mower can plan its paths and navigate itself, the set-up requires you to manually drive the gadget with a remote control to teach it the mowing zone. You can also use this method to set up no-go zones such as trees and washing lines.

Elflein uses an off-the-shelf robotic mower, which they say works out cheaper than buying separate parts, costing around €400 (~US$436). In the project, the main mowing motor, two drive motors with encoders, battery and waterproof enclosure is kept from the original robot mower.

A Raspberry Pi 4 is used to carry out the bulk of the software processing with an ArduSimple RTK GPS board. A smaller Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller carries out real-time tasks. There are also connectors for an emergency stop, a user interface and a sound module.

The OpenMower is an open-source project on GitHub, with a supporting Discord channel, enabling you to download the software and hardware design for free.

Buy the Raspberry Pi Pico Flexible Microcontroller on Amazon