The MOW-BY-SAT Project "Mowing the lawn by satellite"
The priority objective of the MOW-BY-SAT project is to support the development of a GNSS based navigation and guidance system to be integrated into an autonomous lawnmower, paving the way for industrialisation and commercialisation of GNSS applications oriented to domestic service robot, operating outdoor. Up to now, GNSS technologies are not much used in robotic applications. Beyond this concrete application the project aims to increase the adoption of the GNSS technologies towards robotics application, in a relation M2MM (Machine to Mobile Machine). In this context the project will study the benefits of European GNSS (EGNOS and Galileo). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 227824.
Our idea, source of this project, is to increase the adoption of GNSS towards domestic robot applications, like autonomous mowers, which do not currently use GNSS at all for their guidance systems. This would generate economic and social benefits like reduced pollution (lawn mowers with thermal engines frequently have poor tuning and proportionally higher CO2 emission), and decreased domestic accidents rate (too numerous accidents with mowing machines are observed anywhere in the world). In addition it will pave the way for Galileo which, combined to GPS/EGNOS, will dramatically increase the availability of decimeter protection levels, enabling then others robotic applications. The scientific objective of the project is to demonstrate that a local augmentation with the combination of a specific phase processing and EGNOS/EDAS data provides the GNSS receiver with an acceptable risk of non-integrity for a few decimeters protection radius (innovative and unique integrity tuning). In the short term, that will enable the use of GNSS in domestic robotic area, where the service availability is not very stringent like lawn mowing. The project will also demonstrate that the future Galileo signals will allow many safe land activities in robotic, consequently triggering the proliferation of GNSS in several new mass markets segments in this domain. The technical objective of the project is to implement the above scientific concept in a prototype of the cheapest stand alone GNSS technology allowing a lawn mower robot to perform its full mission in an efficient and autonomous way, like a golf keeper would do it safely in such a complex operative area.