Friendly Robotics RL800 Robomower

Other products by Friendly Robotics

Product Description

Amazon.com
Early Adopters Pick: May 2003. The first fully robotic lawnmower that can learn parts of your yard.

The Robomower is convenient, easy, robotic, and clean--and it transforms the world of yard work! Set up (once), turn on, and the Robomower cuts the grass on almost any surface--all by itself. Getting the system set up in your yard can take most of an afternoon, but the well-written manual makes the job easier. The biggest part of the set-up task is stringing the perimeter wire around your yard, marking the boundaries the Robomower will stay within. Once you're set, and the mower is on, the machine simply senses the perimeter wire and uses three mulching blades to cut down everything inside the wire. Thanks to the onboard computer, the Robomower can even learn parts of your yard as it mows, making it quicker next time. The mower is quiet, automatic, and the mulching blades mean that when it's done you don't need to bag or rake.

The Robomower is outfitted with safety features. It won't run at all if it's flipped over with the blades exposed. Likewise, it turns tail and backs off if its soft 360-degree bumpers encounter any foreign object (like a pet or toy or favorite rose bush). A theft deterrent system keeps the unit safe. The Robomower is very quiet compared to other lawn mowers, although because it takes longer to get the job done than a human with a walk-behind mower, what noise there is lasts longer. The mower works best on level yards smaller than 3,200 square feet, with the grass reasonably tame to begin with. It does not work well on hilly or overgrown yards. While it takes a full day to recharge the battery, a full charge is enough to mow most lawns. (The mower is definitely no lightweight, either; it takes two people to remove the machine from the box when it arrives.) The Robomower is definitely a smart idea for folks with physical conditions that make strenuous activities like mowing difficult, but it's also a great product for anyone who feels like there's always something better to do with a weekend afternoon than lawn mowing. Rechargeable power pack comes included.--Brian Trinen

From the Manufacturer
Mowing has never been so easy. This robotic lawnmower is designed to replace your walk/push mower. It operates safely, quietly and automatically. Designed for one-time setup, it works in almost any lawn or garden environment, with wire sensors that prevent it from crossing the lawn perimeter. It even recycles clippings into nutrient-rich mulch for healthier grass. For hard-to-mow corners, switch to the optional manual mode with child-safety lock. Perfect for anyone who lacks the time or physical capability for mowing. You spend a few minutes driving it to and from the lawn. On average it saves you 1-2 hours a week, 4-8 hours a month, 32-64 hours a year! That's a lot of free time you can spend as quality time with your family, on vacation, or doing whatever you really like to do. And now there is no need to worry about theft with the new theft deterrent system. Rechargeable power pack is included. Does not include instructional video.

Product Details

Product Manual [4.04mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 98 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• Shipping Advisory: This item must be shipped separately from other items in your order. Additional shipping charges will not apply.
• ASIN: B000087QPC
• California residents: Click here for Proposition 65 warning.
• Item model number: RL800
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #95,613 in Home Improvement (See Bestsellers in Home Improvement)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

137 of 140 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars RoboMower Exceeded My Expectations, November 12, 2003

By	J. Beacher "Programmer" (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The last time I bought a product this life-changing was the original IBM PC in 1983. RoboMower makes you feel like youve entered a new era, where those Jetsons episodes we watched as kids have finally come true. The first time your robot mows your lawn is like using your first dishwasher, microwave, etc. How did we ever live without this thing?

RoboMower erased all my fears. Would it take too long to mow since it would cut a random pattern? No, RoboMower methodically cut my almost-square front lawn row by row, just like I would have done. Would it lack enough power to cut front and back lawns, about 600 feet of perimeter? No, it can do both on one battery charge! Would I need the rapid charger? No, charging over night works OK since it cuts faster than I expected. Could it handle my still wet grass without clogging? Yes, it cut fine with no grass build-up under the blade areas. Could it handle the slope in my back yard? No problem!

Things the manual didnt tell me that I wish it had:
1) On sweeping curves the wire needs to be placed closer than the supplied ruler and instructions indicate. I moved it 3-4 closer to the edge, otherwise the RoboMower makes turns too wide. The tighter the turn the closer the wire needs to be. Plan on tweaking wires on curves a lot when testing!
2) When you place the wire down the first time, lightly place the stakes, as I found I moved about one in three. When you move one, at that point youll have either too much slack or not enough. To adjust slack youll need to pull the wire through many stakes. Dont expect to tug wire through several stakes at once  the insulation will split on a snug stake and youll have a bare spot! Carefully work slack under each stake. Be sure to leave enough spare wire at BOTH ends of your loop so you can provide slack on either side as needed. If only one side has extra wire, you may have to pull slack through almost all your stakes.
3) You want stakes loose when testing to adjust slack, but if you leave the wire too high off the ground and turn the blades on by mistake youll cut the wire.
4) When I first tested, over a straight stretch of 30 feet I tried just one stake at each end, pulling the wire taught to the ground. That didnt work  the mower can still swish the wire left or right an inch or two and not run the course you intended to test. Youll need the wire snug enough so the mower cant shift it. A stake every 10 feet or so solves that.
5) None of the literature or their website tells you RoboMower comes with only two perimeter wire connectors so you can create only two zones. If you need more you need to order the connector accessory kit.
6) You may need more wire than you think. I had carefully precalculated I would need only 450 feet, so I didnt buy extra wire from Amazon in advance. Turns out on mowing day the 500 foot roll wasnt enough (curves gobble up wire!) so I was running around town searching for more. I tried Sears who sells RoboMower but has no wire. Sears sent me to Home Depot saying any 18-22 gauge copper wire would work. Well, HD doesnt have wire that small!. I finally found it at the Hoover Store, since Hoover stores service RoboMower (and will soon sell the to-be-announced Friendly Robotics Vacuum.)

My front yard is 1800 feet, almost a rectangle with three sweeping curves. RoboMower cuts that in 35 minutes row-by-row from house to curb, like I would in one pass, in a methodical manor perpendicular to the street leaving no uncut areas between rows. But the mowing pattern it uses on my 3600-foot rear yard is quite different. First it cuts at a 45-degree angle leaving uncut areas between the rows it cuts. When done with this first pass, it shifts 90-degrees to cut across the first rows, catching some uncut spaces but not all. Then it shifts again, hoping to catch more uncut areas. This behavior means some areas are cut repeatedly so it needs about two hours to mow the rear yard.

Mowing efficiency has a lot to do with where you train it to leave the edge to start mowing inside. When it starts mowing, it seems to ponder about what kind of area it is within. If started in a small leg off your main lawn and it keeps bumping the wire time and again after a short distance, it does into a different behavior than if it starts within a very large area and encounters the wire infrequently. However it starts seems to be how it will continue to mow, seemingly choosing the pattern it thinks fits what it first encountered. So, Im experimenting with the learn perimeter function to teach it exactly how far to trim the edge before turning inside the lawn. My theory is if I start the mower in the same spot each time, and teach it to leave edge trimming in the correct place, it will always choose the better pattern for my lawn. If you start it in a different spot each time it may mow less efficiently at times. So, like a child, RoboMower needs a little advice.

Id rate this among the most fabulous purchases of my lifetime. The biggest problems: feeling guilty because youre doing no work and dealing with your neighbors who stop to watch you watching your mower at work.

90 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars RL800 is great, April 26, 2003

By	Cave Arnold (Zachary, LA USA) - See all my reviews

This is a great mower! I researched it and liked the reviews of the RL500. When the RL800 was available I ordered it immediately. It took a little while to set up the perimeters correctly for the 5 zones around my house. I have mowed my entire yard twice so far and have no complaints. I still have to do some trim work around the edges of the house and the fence line, but this is minimal. So far, this has been the best investment in my lifetime. I just start it up then surf the net, watch a movie, play with my two kids, etc. In fact, it is mowing one zone as I type this review! I periodically listen for the hum out the open window. The first time I mowed each zone I watched it pretty closely and made a few changes to the perimeter wiring, but now I just monitor it occasionally.

While researching the RL800, I was always looking for practical details on the size of yards that had been successfully mowed by the RoboMower. For any who are interested the details of my yard are in the next paragraph.

I have a large yard 22,749 sq. ft., which is mostly centipede grass although near the fence line there are a number of weeds and Rye that grows pretty thick and tall (4-5 inches in some isolated areas). I subdivided this into 5 zones each approximately 4,500 sq. ft. I live in Louisiana so the land is flat, but there is a 10-15 degree incline along about 30' of the rear of the house. The RoboMower handles it like a champ. I was a bit concerned about some tree roots that protruded from the ground a bit less than 1", but no problem. I have the RL800 set to mow at 1.5" and the rear wheels at their highest setting and it goes right over the roots of a few large pine trees. I was also concerned about pine cones, even though I pick these up before mowing sometimes I miss one or one will fall if it is a windy day. The RL800 has hit only one in the first ten zones it has mowed, but it chewed the side off of it and the blades are still sharp. I do not recommend that you do not try to pick up stray sticks and pine cones, but if you happen to miss one the RL800 seems resilient enough to take it and keep on going. I ordered the sped charger and another battery at the same time I ordered the RL800, but have not received them yet. Currently, I mow a zone a day (or night). When I get home from work if it is dry I pick up around a zone and start the RL800 about 5:00-5:30. I have it set to max run time, but usually it does a good job after 3 hours of work and I go out and stop it and take back inside the shop to recharge. When I get the fast charger I will post another review to say how that affects the over all efficiency of mowing with the RoboMower. ...

59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The pros and cons of robomowing, June 2, 2003

By	Gus Smedstad (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Before using the robomower, I had to lay out a perimeter wire for each of the areas I wanted mowed. In my case, I divided my lawn into three sections, the back yard, the front yard to the left of my driveway, and the front yard to the right of the driveway. The wire is an electronic barrier, not a physical one. It's flush with the ground, and held in place by plastic tent pegs. The tent pegs and the wire come with the mower.

Besides the outside edge, I also used the wire to mark off obstacles. I have some mulched covered areas with plants, and some of the trees have mulch around them that's too steep for the mower, and which doesn't need to be mowed anyway. For islands, I ran a wire from the perimeter, circled the obstacle, and then ran a wire back parallel to the incoming wire. Two wires side by side cancel each other out, and the mower ignores it.

Not all obstacles require wire. I did not have to mark several of the trees in the back yard. The mower has bumpers around the outside edge, and if the obstacle is 6" tall and reasonably resilient, that's sufficient. It doesn't bump into things very hard, but a soft plant stem isn't going to offer enough resistance.

Laying down the wire was a lot of work. I ended up pegging down about 1200 feet of wire to enclose a 1/2 acre lawn, which probably took me about 3 hours total. Objectively this is more work than mowing the lawn a couple of times would have been, but it was more interesting than mowing. There's a little mental challenge in trying to place a reasonable curve around an obstacle or an edge.

The mower comes with a signal generator which I attach to the wire for the zone I'm going to mow. After I release the mower into the zone, the mower seeks out an edge and then follows it for roughly one complete circuit. The mower then begins criss-crossing the lawn, stopping each time it either senses the wire or bumps into an obstacle. It then turns slightly and reverses direction, mowing a strip roughly parallel to the first. Eventually it decides to take a 90 degree turn, to being mowing a set of strips in an alternate direction.

The mower is really slow, particularly since it misses large patches on the initial pass. It makes up for this by making several passes over the lawn. For each zone, I've let it run for the maximum time of 2 1/2 hours, and despite those patches it missed initially it mowed everything by the time it was done. I had no complaints about the result in the back yard. To my mind, it doesn't matter how long it takes, since my time investment is a couple of minutes to drive it over to the lawn, and then a press of the "go" button.

The mower is very, very quiet. It has three 7" blades, and it's battery powered, so I can hardly hear it from inside the house. The sound is kind of funky, like a turbine or something, since the three blades produce odd harmonics.

My only real problem came up with the left front yard, which has an unusual feature. It's a large depression that was intended as a catch basin for water runoff, so that rain goes back into the water table instead of the sewer. Some of the angles are just plain too steep for the mower. To be fair, they'd be too steep for any mower - the robomower is short and squat, and very stable, but a 40 degree angle slope is likely to tip any mower over.

Some of the slopes are gentle enough for the mower, so my initial attempt was to mark off only the steep slopes. This resulted in a cup-shaped obstacle, which actually had "lips" and a relatively narrow opening. Unfortunately, while the mower handled the slopes I left open well enough, it spent way too much bouncing around inside the depression. It never quite figured its way around to the other side, which it did quite handly with more convex obstacles I marked in other zones.

As a result, I marked the entire thing off as an obstacle, and made a tiny zone inside the depression.

Alternately, I could have mowed this manually. Driving the mower manually is sort of like playing a videogame. There's a controller on a coiled leash that has a direction pad. I push the direction pad, and the mower goes in that direction. The turning radius is zero, since the drive wheels can spin in opposite directions if you ask for a tight turn. It works, but it's really kind of awkward, particularly if I have to make several turns.

I do have to drive it manually with the controller to and from the lawn. The mower is heavy, mainly because it has a big, sealed lead-acid battery. It's roughly the size and weight of a car battery. It lifts out easily so you can do things like tilt the mower on its side to clean the blades.

The mower takes a long time to charge. The instructions say 24 hours, but it's more like 30 in my experience. This means that as a practical matter, I can only mow once every two days. This isn't really a drawback, since each zone probably only needs to be mowed every two weeks, though it was annoying when I was first starting and was impatient to play with the new toy. They do sell an external fast charger which takes 6 hours to charge the battery. They also sell extra batteries, again for convenience.

Overall, I'm happy with my gadget purchase. It's quiet, it does the job, and it requires almost no effort on my part to mow the lawn, now that I've invested the labor of placing the wires.