Development and Evaluation of a Remote Controlled
Electric Lawn Mower
Diego A. Aponte-Roa Xavier Collazo
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Universidad del Turabo Universidad del Turabo
Gurabo, Puerto Rico Gurabo, Puerto Rico
aponted1@suagm.edu xcollazo4@email.suagm.edu
Albert A. Espinoza
Mechanical Engineering Department
Universidad del Turabo
Gurabo, Puerto Rico
espinozaa1@suagm.edu
Abstract—This work focuses on the development of a fully
autonomous lawn mower that can be used by people with limited
mobility. The lawn mower can be set to cover a predefined area
autonomously or it can be controlled manually via a radio-
control (RC) transmitter, which allows the user to remotely
control the lawn mower in any direction, turn the mower motor
at a desired speed, and adjust the grass cutting height. In
autonomous mode, the user can also define the area to be mowed
and program the grid pattern the lawn mower will follow. Once
the prototype was completed, the lawn mower was field tested to
verify the overall functionality and accuracy of the autonomous
mission plan and to determine the overall runtime battery life.
Results of the fully-functional prototype demonstrate a successful
autonomous operation.
Keywords—Lawn Mower, Autonomous Vehicles, Navigation,
Robotics, Embedded Systems, ArduPilot.
I. INTRODUCTION
Teleoperated mobile vehicle technology has received
increased attention in recent years, mostly because of recent
improvements in and increased availability of open-source,
feature-rich, small-scale microcontroller architectures and
readily available wired and wireless sensor technology, which
allows for a seamless integration of hardware and software.
This has resulted in a widespread use of this technology in a
wide range of applications, such as agriculture [1], unmanned
aerial vehicles [2], space exploration [3], and even in everyday
use appliances, such as vacuuming and mopping robots [4].
Currently, mowing the lawn can be tiring and time consuming,
which can be physically restrictive, particularly for people with
limited mobility. Thus, the purpose of this work is to present
how these technological advances were used to develop an
autonomous, electrical motor-driven lawn mower, with the
intent of using the resulting prototype as a mobile platform that
can be wirelessly operated by a user with limited mobility or
any other physical impediment.
II. RELATED WORK
There are several autonomous lawn mower projects in the
literature, and even a few commercial products. However, most
of these commercially available systems require the installation
of perimeter wires [5], which are used to delineate the edge of
the lawn or to cordon off areas that are off limits. This can be
978-1-7281-0554-3/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE
Miguel Goenaga
Universidad del Turabo
Gurabo, Puerto Rico
mgoenaga1@suagm.edu
Kasandra Vazquez
Mechanical Engineering Department
Universidad del Turabo
Gurabo, Puerto Rico
kvazquez101@email.suagm.edu
particularly problematic for people with certain physical
impediments. To eliminate the need for limit wires, other
companies, such as iRobot, are focusing on the development of
radio beaconing devices, which can be used to let the lawn
mower robot know where the boundaries are located [6]. Most
of the current research activity related to autonomous lawn
mowers focuses on the use of costly sensors, such as laser
scanners or LIDAR [7, 8] to achieve lawn coverage and
obstacle avoidance. Other researchers have focused on solving
the complex problem of detecting objects and lawn limits using
highly complex vision-based systems [9]. As an alternative to
these approaches, we propose that complete lawn coverage,
and to a lesser degree, object avoidance can be achieved using
low-cost, off the shelf components, such as Global Positioning
System (GPS) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)
navigation sensors, such as those widely used in Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The development of UAV navigation
control systems has reached maturity in the past decade and
has resulted in the creation of open-source architectures that
can be used to control custom-made unmanned aerial,
underwater, and ground vehicles. One of the most popular
UAV open-source software suites is ArduPilot, initially
developed by Jordi Munoz and Chris Anderson in 2007.
ArduPilot offers a direct means of using navigation data from
the IMU and GPS data to control the position of unmanned
vehicles. Once the robotic system is configured and calibrated
to run ArduPilot, the robot is then programmed with its
predefined mission waypoints. From the user’s perspective, all
that is needed is a Ground Station PC running an open-source
Ground Station Application software (e.g., Mission Planner) to
define the path the robot must follow. Using this process, the
user does not need to install guide wires, nor boundary beacons
which might be difficult especially for people with limited
mobility. In addition, since the area is already delineated, the
vehicle navigation system does not need to rely on complex
visual odometry algorithms to detect lawn limits.
Thus, this work focuses on the using an autonomous lawn
mower prototype equipped with an IMU and GPS to evaluate
the use of ArduPilot to achieve complete lawn coverage. To the
authors’ knowledge, there has not been a previous study to
assess the feasibility of using the navigation control algorithms
in ArduPilot to a small-scale vehicle to completely cover a
predefined area that requiring less than 1 m resolution, as is the
case of the robotic lawn mower developed in this work.
0090
 RC
Transmitter
Left Track
24 V DC GPS Antenna
Gearmotor AR 610 RC
Receiver

Navio2 HAT
11.1 V LiPo 11.1 V LiPo Dual 25A
2200 mAh 2200 mAh Motor Raspberry Pi 3
Battery Battery Driver

20 V Li-Ion
Battery

Right Track 13A Motor

24 V DC Driver
Power 13A Motor
Gearmotor Driver
Signal
Cutting Height
12 V DC Motor Cutting Head
18 V DC Motor

Fig. 1. Autonomous Lawn Mower Block Diagram

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section III

presents a description of the hardware and features of the
robotic lawn mower system, Sections IV and V are dedicated
to the discussion of the preliminary battery tests and short field
tests done to evaluate the design of the lawn mower, and
finally, Section VI provides concluding remarks and a
discussion of possible avenues for future work.
III. REMOTE-CONTROLLED LAWN MOWER HARDWARE
The overall system was designed around an MLT-42
tracked vehicle chassis developed by SuperDroidRobots [10],
with the addition of the hardware required for the lawn mower
application. The lawn mower can be controlled directly via
radio control signals in Manual mode or Autonomously via a
GPS-enabled onboard navigation control unit (NCU) (see Figs.
1, 2(a), and 2(b)). The lawn mower also features an adjustable
cutting height stage and a variable speed thread-based cutting
head.

GPS Antenna Fig. 2(b). Remote-Controlled Lawn Mower (Internal Components)

Adjustable Cutting
Height Stage As shown in the block diagram presented in Fig. 1, the
MLT-42 tracks are driven by a dual motor driver, which
provides controlled power to two 24V brushed DC motors, one
Navigation Control each track rotation. The motor controller also powers the radio-
Unit (NCU) control (RC) receiver and the navigation control unit (NCU).
The NCU was programmed to receive the incoming radio
signals from the RC receiver in Manual control mode and to
use onboard navigation data from the embedded IMU
accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers, as well as
from the GPS sensors in Autonomous Mode. Additionally, the
Cutting Head NCU also is used to control the grass cutting height and cutting
speed via their respective motor driver.
MLT-42 Chassis
The NCU itself is composed of a Raspberry Pi Model 3 B
Fig. 2(a). Remote-Controlled Lawn Mower (External Components) running ArduPilot software and a Navio2 Autopilot Raspberry

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Pi HAT. The Navio2 features a host of navigation sensors,
including a high-resolution barometer, two independent sets of
triaxial accelerometers, magnetometers, and gyroscopes, as
well as GPS/GNSS data.
In addition to processing all navigation sensor data, the
NCU also processes PPM/SBUS radio input signals commonly
used in radio control applications and can send out up to 12
independent PWM signals to control external motors, servos,
or other peripherals. All RC I/O data is processed by a
dedicated Cortex-M3 processor.

A. Ground Station Application

Mission Planner was used as the Ground Station
Application to communicate with the ArduPilot software Fig. 4. RC Input Signal Calibration Screen
running on the Raspberry Pi, configure all the navigation-
relevant parameters and calibrate the on-board sensors.
Additionally, Mission Planner also provides runtime telemetry
and waypoint creation capabilities, so the user can program an
autonomous mission using basic point-and-click using Google
Maps (see Fig. 3). Mission Planner communicates with the
onboard ArduPilot software using Micro Air Vehicle Link
(MAVLink) communication protocol.
The first step after installing ArduPilot is to calibrate all the
IMU sensors and ensure that the NCU has an adequate GPS
signal. Calibration is achieved by gathering average sensor
readings at strategic vehicle orientations, such as when the
vehicle is leveled, pointing up, pointing down, etc. This data is
then used by the NCU to determine the orientation of the
vehicle using Earth’s magnetic and gravitational fields as Fig. 5. Failsafe Mode Setup
reference.
IV. PRELIMINARY BATTERY CHARACTERIZATIONS
Once the sensors are calibrated, the operator must ensure
Before testing the lawn mower out in the field, the two
that the RC transmitter signals are calibrated to ensure that the
desired command signals are being sent through the proper 11.1V LiPo batteries used to power each of the tracks were
channels to the NCU (Fig. 4). Finally, the operator must also tested under constant motor speeds of 75% of the rated full
establish the required failsafe actions that must be carried out speed of 240 RPM during lawn mower operation on level,
in the event of certain emergency scenarios, such as loss of RC short grass terrain. The batteries lasted a total runtime of 1
or GPS signals, low system battery, or if the mower loses hour, 27 minutes.
connection with the Ground Control Station (the last one is In addition, the cutting head motor 20V, 5Ah battery was
optional). For this application, the lawn mower was set to tested using an electronic load to provide constant discharge
return to launch location, or RTL (i.e., Home) in any of these
rates which were determined to be within the expected range
events (See Fig. 5).
during operation (i.e., 5A, 6A, and 7A) from the motor
specifications. The results of these tests are shown in Fig. 6
and demonstrate that the battery lasted from about 28 to 52
minutes during operation, which is much lower than the
runtime of the vehicle track batteries. Thus, the cutting head
motor battery is the determining factor affecting the overall
system runtime.
In addition to the battery capacity characterization tests, a
series of short field tests were carried out to determine the
overall effects of varying grass heights on the runtime of the
cutter head motor battery under manual operation. The results
are presented in Table I.
The preliminary field test results demonstrate that grass
height has a significant adverse impact on battery life. These
Fig. 3. Mission Planner Graphical User Interface results are useful to determine the operational limits of the

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lawn mower design. However, it is feasible that, in practice,
the lawn mower will be ultimately used as a regular-
maintenance apparatus, meaning that the grass the lawn
mower will cut may be on the shorter end of the spectrum,
provided the lawn mower is used frequently.
In manual mode, the entire area was covered in a total
runtime of 3 hours, 34 minutes (not including stops to replace
batteries nor operator shifts). Overall, the cutter head battery
was replaced a total of 6 times, which means that each totally
spent battery lasted an average time of 33 minutes and the last
battery had approximately 60% of its total charge capacity
remaining. It is worth noting that the track motor batteries
were also replaced each time the cutter head battery was
replaced.
In autonomous mode, ArduPilot allows the operator some
control over the degree of overlap between each waypoint line
pass, the total number of line passes, and even the separation
distance between each waypoint line, thus simplifying the
development of the autonomous mission plan.
The selected region was thus sectioned off using a grid-
like pattern as shown in Fig. 8. Each yellow line in Fig. 8
represents a path line that the lawn mower will pass through
and each green flag marker represents a waypoint in the lawn
mower trajectory. The separation between each path line was
set to 0.3 m to allow the lawn mower to cover the entire area.

Fig. 6. Battery Discharge Tests at 5A, 6A, and 7A discharge

Additionally, the operator can also set an average robot
speed (in this case, it was chosen to be approximately 1 m/s).
Under these conditions, the entire area was successfully
TABLE I. PRELIMINARY BATTERY FIELD TESTS covered in a total runtime of 1 hour, 31 minutes. The cutter
head battery had to be replaced twice, for an average runtime
Field Area Grass Height Test Duration Battery
[m2] [cm] [min] Capacity Left of 32 minutes for each replaced battery and the last battery
39.5 10 45 30% had about 35% of its total charge capacity remaining.
56.9 18 38 5%

26.75 25 28 0%

V. FINAL FIELD TESTS AND DISCUSSION

The lawn mower was field tested to assess the battery
runtime during manual and autonomous operation modes. The
selected area was chosen to be 800 m2 and had moderately
high grass (i.e., about 13 cm, on average) and a flat
topography free of obstacles (See Fig. 7).
The grass cutting height was set to 6.5 cm and the cutting
speed was set to 75 percent of its full speed. The lawn mower
was operated until the cutter battery reached 20% of its overall
capacity.
Fig. 7. Field Test Region (Area=800 m2)
Fig. 8. Grid Pattern Mission Waypoints
VI. CONCLUSIONS
The design of an autonomous, GPS enabled lawn mower
was tested successfully under manual and autonomous
operational modes. Compared to manual mode, the
autonomous operation of the lawn mower resulted in a more
efficient way of mowing the lawn, greatly reducing the
mowing time by about 57%.
However, although the autonomous mode resulted in a
significant improvement in mowing efficiency, the lawn
mower design can be improved upon by the implementation of
an optimized trajectory, which may lead to a significant
reduction in mission time. In addition, a charging base can be
designed to automate the battery charging process and thus
eliminate the operator’s involvement during the mowing

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process. Finally, the use of GPS for navigation is prone to
large errors, particularly in areas occluded by tall trees or
buildings. Thus, it may be necessary to develop an alternative
autonomous operational mode that does not rely heavily on
GPS data for navigation. All of these enhancements will be
the subject of future work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the
Puerto Rico Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation
(PR-LSAMP), the José Domingo Pérez school of Engineering
at the Universidad del Turabo, and the Puerto Rico Energy
Center (PREC).
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