The Interior Department tests AI-controlled lawnmowers on the National Mall as part of the Trump administration's effort to save taxpayer dollars and boost efficiency.

If you're going to splurge on something this Prime Day, it might as well be on free time and a spotless yard. You can get both those things by getting 20% off one of these Segway Navimow i Series robot lawnmowers. Usually available for 1,299, the i110N is on sale for 1,039 on Prime Day, the lowest price it's ever had, while the i105 is down to 799 from its usual price of 999. The Navimow series of lawnmowers is exactly what you need if you want to gain more free hours during the weekends, and keep your lawn looking great while spending less time in the sweltering sun maintaining it. One of the best things about these Segway Navimow lawnmowers is that they don't even need a perimeter wire.

Efficient Coverage Path Planning (CPP) is necessary for autonomous robotic lawnmowers to effectively navigate and maintain lawns with diverse and irregular shapes. This paper introduces a comprehensive end-to-end pipeline for CPP, designed to convert user-defined boundaries on an aerial map into optimized coverage paths seamlessly. The pipeline includes user input extraction, coordinate transformation, area decomposition and path generation using our novel AdaptiveDecompositionCPP algorithm, preview and customization through an interactive coverage path visualizer, and conversion to actionable GPS waypoints. The AdaptiveDecompositionCPP algorithm combines cellular decomposition with an adaptive merging strategy to reduce non-mowing travel thereby enhancing operational efficiency. Experimental evaluations, encompassing both simulations and real-world lawnmower tests, demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in coverage completeness and mowing efficiency.

You likely have a smart assistant on your phone, a robot vacuum cleaner that sweeps and mops your floors, smart switches that turn off the lights without you even getting out of bed, a smart speaker that instructs your go-to assistant to play your favorite songs, and so on. Why don't you also have a smart robot lawn mower for your yard? The Segway Navimow i Series could be the missing link in your smart home setup. Segway's smart robot lawnmowers can be a great addition to any house, freeing up countless hours spent mowing for more pleasurable activities, such as spending time by the pool, having fun with the family, or just enjoying your hobbies. By adding a Navimow to your smart home setup, you'll get a perfect lawn without any of the effort usually required.

Lenovo's Project Crystal is definitely sci-fi tech come to life. Currently, there are no plans to turn the concept laptop into a retail product. Instead, its ThinkPad division commissioned an exploration into the potential of transparent microLED panels and, sigh, AI integration. The most obvious use for the transparent laptop display would be sharing info at a doctor's office or hotel desk. Instead of needing to flip a screen around, you could simply reverse the device's output via software.

Hedgehogs are increasingly being killed and injured from encounters with robot lawnmowers which have few safety features to protect wildlife, according to Oxford University scientists. Researchers conducted a series of tests with the mowers, the latest must-have garden gadget, with a view to create a'hedgehog friendly' certification so gardeners need not fear any prickly casualties when they trim the grass. To ensure no harm was caused to living hedgehogs, scientists used rubber'crash test hedgehogs' instead to see if the robot mower would turn away on encountering one of Mrs Tiggywinkle's tribe on the lawn. Hedgehogs are already in serious decline, with reasons including habitat loss, road traffic accidents, intensive agriculture, and injuries from dog bites and garden strimmers. But now mowers are adding to the threats.

Consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that searches for an unknown number of targets at unknown positions in 3D space. A particle filter uses imperfect measurements about the targets to update an intensity function that represents the expected number of targets. We propose a receding-horizon planner that selects the next UAV position by maximizing a joint, exploration and target-refinement objective. Confidently localized targets are saved and removed from consideration. A nonlinear controller with an obstacle-avoidance component is used to reach the desired waypoints. We demonstrate the performance of our approach through a series of simulations, as well as in real-robot experiments with a Parrot Mambo drone that searches for targets from a constant altitude. The proposed planner works better than a lawnmower and a target-refinement-only method.

Semi-autonomous machines, autonomous machines and robots inhabit closed, semi-closed and open environments, more structured environments like the household or more unstructured environments like cultural landscapes or the wilderness. There they encounter domestic animals, farm animals, working animals, and wild animals. These creatures could be disturbed, displaced, injured, or killed by the machines. Within the context of machine ethics and social robotics, the School of Business FHNW developed several design studies and prototypes for animal-friendly machines, which can be understood as moral and social machines in the spirit of these disciplines. In 2019-20, a team led by the main author developed a prototype robot lawnmower that can recognize hedgehogs, interrupt its work for them and thus protect them. Every year many of these animals die worldwide because of traditional service robots. HAPPY HEDGEHOG (HHH), as the invention is called, could be a solution to this problem. This article begins by providing an introduction to the background. Then it focuses on navigation (where the machine comes across certain objects that need to be recognized) and thermal and image recognition (with the help of machine learning) of the machine. It also presents obvious weaknesses and possible improvements. The results could be relevant for an industry that wants to market their products as animal-friendly machines.

DIY expert Chip Wade shows'Fox & Friends Weekend' the finishing touches on his Georgia home. DIY expert Chip Wade showed off some of the finishing touches he put on his home in Chatsworth, Georgia. For a "Fox & Friends Weekend" segment on July 22, Wade and his family were in their brand new backyard at their home in the mountains of Georgia. Over the past year, Wade has been building a house with the help of 3D rendering. "And now he's finished," said co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy.

This paper reports an investigation into the problem of rapid identification of a channel that crosses a body of water using one or more Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV). A new algorithm called Proposal Based Adaptive Channel Search (PBACS) is presented as a potential solution that improves upon current methods. The empirical performance of PBACS is compared to lawnmower surveying and to Markov decision process (MDP) planning with two state-of-the-art reward functions: Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) and Maximum Value Information (MVI). The performance of each method is evaluated through comparison of the time it takes to identify a continuous channel through an area, using one, two, three, or four USVs. The performance of each method is compared across ten simulated bathymetry scenarios and one field area, each with different channel layouts. The results from simulations and field trials indicate that on average multi-vehicle PBACS outperforms lawnmower, UCB, and MVI based methods, especially when at least three vehicles are used.