Development of a Solar-Powered Robotic Lawn Mower

Lawn keeping has been a major issue in campus environment due to rising cost of diesel fuel and lack of man power to operate both tractor-mounted and motorized lawn mowers. An automated solar-powered robotic lawn mower was developed in this research work to solve this problem. The components of the mower include a frame, three caster wheels, two gear motors which provide the forward motion, a 12v DC cutter motor which rotates the cutting blade, 2202mAH limpo battery for power supply, a 16W solar panel for charging the battery, a charge controller, a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ microcontroller which controls the motors, and a VNC mobile app for setting inputs for control. The mover was locally fabricated at the Agricultural Engineering workshop of The Federal Polytechnic, Ado-Ekiti, and it was tested in an open field. The effective field capacity and field efficiency of the machine were found to be 0.13 m2/s and 88% respectively. The total cost of producing the mower was 185,800 naira. The mower is recommended for large scale production and for usage on campuses.