Engineers have developed an outdoor garden trimming robot that will make life easier for site owners who have a habit of keeping the garden organized. The robot – called Trimbot – is designed to maintain communal green spaces, support farmers, and help people with mobility issues tend their gardens.
The Trimbot uses cameras and 3D mapping technology to find its way around gardens and perform precise tasks with cutting tools. It is equipped with five pairs of cameras and a flexible robotic arm fitted on an Indego robot lawnmower developed by German electronics company Bosch.
The most modern technologies used to create the robot allow it to move around the site completely autonomously. It performs the maintenance of the garden by cutting the lawn in its path or carrying out more precise actions with the robotic arm.
Researchers have created specific algorithms that allow this battery-powered gardener robot to be able to prune a neglected bush to give it the desired shape. In addition, Trimbot can prune roses by pinpointing the exact part of each plant’s stem that should be cut. As you can see in the images, it has different cutting tools to use the most appropriate depending on the occasion.
The team behind the concept believe that their development can be used on a large scale.
The Trimbot 2020 project has been funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program. Led by the University of Edinburgh, the project involves scientists from Wageningen University and Research, the Universities of Amsterdam, Groningen and Freiburg, ETH Zurich, and Bosch.
