Don’t Sleep On The Lawn, There’s an AI-Powered, Flamethrower-Wielding Robot About

Don’t Sleep On The Lawn, There’s an AI-Powered, Flamethrower-Wielding Robot About

You know how it goes, you’re just hanging out in the yard, there aren’t enough hours in the day, and weeding the lawn is just such a drag. Then an idea just pops into your head. How about we attach a gas powered flamethrower to a robot arm, drive it around on a tank-tracked robotic base, and have it operate autonomously with an AI brain? Yes, that sounds like a good idea. Let’s do that. And so, [Dave Niewinski] did exactly that with his Ultimate Weed Killing Robot.


And you thought the robot overlords might take a more subtle approach and take over the world one coffee machine at a time? No, straight for the fully-autonomous flamethrower it is then.


This build uses a Kinova Robots Gen 3 six-axis arm, mounted to an Agile-X Robotics Bunker base. Control is via a Connect Tech Rudi-NX box which contains an Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX Edge AI computing engine. Wow that was a mouthful!


Connectivity from the controller to the base is via CAN bus, but, sadly no mention of how the robot arm controller is hooked up. At least this particular model sports an effector mount camera system, which can feed straight into the Jetson, simplifying the build somewhat.


To start the software side of things, [Dave] took a video using his mobile phone while walking his lawn. Next he used
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