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On the Edge: Go Big Green

December 1, 2011  - By
Image: GPS World

By Tracy Cozzens

Nav On Time, a French Company located in Toulouse, has successfully completed a trial campaign of its Mow-By-Sat precision guidance on a commercial lawnmower. In August, the prototype of a GPS-guided robot lawnmower was installed on a golf driving range near Toulouse and tested in real conditions of use, day and night, maintaining a 25,000 square meter lawn since then. In a previous campaign, the mower covered more than 2.2 million yards — equal to1,250 miles or 2,000 kilometers — in 2,100 hours. (See videos of the mower in action at www.youtube.com/DSnavontime.)

With such a success under its belt, Nav On Time is negotiating with different lawnmower manufacturers to bring a product to market. The autonomous lawnmowers already on the market, including machines commercialized by research partner BelRobotics, use underground wired perimeters for delimiting the lawn by an electromagnetic signal, the strength of which is measured by a mower-embedded sensor to determine its distance to the lawn’s limit. But that wire, and its required installation, are technical barriers for a lot of potential customers. Nav On Time is one of the companies developing solutions to get rid of the perimetric wire yet still be able to guide the mower autonomously with accuracy and efficiency.

Between January 2009 and June 2010, Nav On Time coordinated the Mow-by-Sat project, a research and development effort that received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013). Partners included Belrobotics of Belgium, a large lawn-maintenance robot manufacturer, and the University of Catania in Sicily, Italy, through its robotics research department.

The Mow-by-Sat project (www.mow-by-sat.eu) was also undertaken to support development of a GNSS-based navigation and guidance system integrated into an autonomous lawnmower, paving the way for industrialization and commercialization of GNSS applications for a domestic service robot operating outdoors. Beyond this concrete application, the project aimed to increase the adoption of GNSS technologies in robotics applications, studying the benefits of European GNSS (especially EGNOS and Galileo).

Mow-By-Sat uses a virtual fence to replace the wired boundary traditionally used in robot lawnmowers, which provides better flexibility for defining and modifying a mowing area. Mow-By-Sat enhances the machine’s efficiency by a factor of three, as full steering substitutes for the random operation mode, the company said.

Built around a European GNSS L1 automotive receiver, the u-blox T, Mow-By-Sat uses L1 fixed / floating real-time kinematic (RTK) techniques. A tight coupling between the RTK positioning firmware and the guidance application software aids the mower’s precision. Nav On Time compared it to the challenges of aviation, where the required navigation performance depends on the flight phase.

In its patented architecture, the module embedded in the rover is dumb, and the ground-based station acts as a remote control, ensures traffic management between several machines, and serves as a gateway for remote services such as installation, supervision, and surveillance, all accessible from the Internet. Nav On Time developed both the positioning firmware and guidance application software.

According to Nav On Time CEO Michèle Poncelet, Mow-By-Sat offers significant competitive advantages to the machine manufacturer compared to expensive RTK solutions now on the market. She cited:

  • easy customization because of its open architecture,
  • an affordable solution for small and inexpensive mobile machines,
  • a technology enabler for replacing human-controlled and energy-consuming machines with smaller and cheaper machines that have a smaller carbon footprint.

With six Engineers, Nav On Time, founded in 2007, is offering a product line dedicated to precision control solutions for small and inexpensive mobile machines, under a business-to-business model through industrial partnerships. According to Poncelet, its market stretches from human controlled machines (precision agriculture or crane collision avoidance) as driver’s assistance, to unmanned machines (autonomous lawnmowers, other unmanned ground vehicles, intelligent vehicles, and more generally service robots) with full steering.

Other applications envisioned by Nav On Time include a golfball retrieval robot for driving ranges, a beach cleaner robot, and a surveillance robot — any application that requires passing through a pre-determined area in a methodical and systematic way.

Breaking Ground

It would seem mowing lawns isn’t a beloved pastime, as autonomous lawn mowers have been the subject of numerous research projects. For the past eight years, the Institute of Navigation has sponsored a Robotic Lawnmower Competition as a way to encourage college students to develop autonomous steering techniques. During the second ION Autonomous Lawnmower competition, Frank Van Graas, who accompanied the winning Ohio University team, told GPS World, “The centimeter-level positioning accuracy required for lawnmowers in the contest is actually more difficult than automatically landing an airplane.”

One research project, carried out by Navcom Technology in 2005, resulted in an autonomous mower taking on the precise mowing techniques of baseball stadiums, with its checkered patterns. The Navcom project, documented by Michael Zeitzew in his paper “Autonomous Utility Mower,” used a series of beacons to augment GPS. Two off-the-shelf John Deere utility mowers were modified for X-by-wire control, and fixed navigation beacons were mounted around the stadium. Next, the field boundaries were surveyed and input into a map file, used to create the mower’s mission plan.

“The use of GPS requires good sky visibility,” explained Zeitzew. “In this application, due to the stringent navigation accuracy requirements, an RTK-GPS solution is required, which requires the use of a base station. Because many of the baseball stadiums have high walls and other obstructions around the field, RTK-GPS is inadequate, even with augmentation by (affordable) inertial sensors or odometry sensors. This necessitated the use of alternative technology.”

Navcom fielded two mower systems into professional baseball stadiums, one major league and one minor league. Both systems were used over the course of several weeks during the spring 2005 baseball season, and received positive reviews from the professional groundskeepers, who quickly grew comfortable using the machines. The project proved not only that autonomous mowers are possible even for large-scale sites such as a stadium, but that there is indeed a market for them.

 

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About the Author: Tracy Cozzens

Senior Editor Tracy Cozzens joined GPS World magazine in 2006. She also is editor of GPS World’s newsletters and the sister website Geospatial Solutions. She has worked in government, for non-profits, and in corporate communications, editing a variety of publications for audiences ranging from federal government contractors to teachers.