Robust grass boundary detection for lawn mower with a novel design of detection device

摘要

The automation of lawn mower can eliminate a lot of boring manual work. With the application of the intelligent technology, especially the automatic detection of grass boundary, the lawn mower can maintain the lawn regularly. However, typical boundary detection technology requires the user to set up a border wire around the lawn that defines the area to be mowed, which is a time-consuming and boring operation. Through a broad analysis of the characteristics of grass and non-grass terrain, in this paper, a novel device is designed to automatically detect the grass boundary. Without any prior manual work, lawn mower with our detection device can adapt to all kinds of grass environment. Our device requires only a line infrared light source and a camera with bandpass infrared filter. Light source, camera and grass make up a triangulation. With a simple but effective approach, grass boundary is detected robustly in the continuous frames. The practical experimental results on a variety of non-grass terrains and grasses demonstrate the effectiveness and the robustness of our method.