The responsibility of mowing the lawn has put a damper on many a teenager's summer, but that might change in the not-so-distant future.
That's because iRobot, the company best known for its automated vacuum cleaner Roomba, was given clearance by the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday to make and sell a robotic lawn mower.
The company designed a robotic lawn mower that would operate outdoors and connect wirelessly to stakes in the ground with transmitters attached, also called beacons, that would guide the robot on the ground in a designated area to trim the grass, according to a document about the ruling released by the FCC. These beacons would be no higher than 24 inches.
However, the FCC typically doesn't allow "wideband systems" because of their ability to interfere with the transmissions of other devices using the same frequency. Because of this, iRobot required a waiver for its stake design, and the FCC ruled that iRobot's robotic lawnmower would not create the "wide area communications systems" that it seeks to prevent because of the beacons' low power radio frequency and relatively low height.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory opposed iRobot's waiver request because it felt that the company's robotic lawnmower frequency could interfere with telescopes that it operates. To address NARO's complaint, iRobot said "its calculations show that there is an exceedingly low practical risk that the iRobot RLM system would cause harmful interference," according to the FFC document. The company also said it would inform users in the device's instruction manual that the robotic lawn mower is only to be used in residential areas.
However, it may be a while before grass-eating robots take over every lawn in America.
"The FCC's decision will allow iRobot to continue exploring the viability of wideband, alongside other technologies, as part of a long-term product exploration effort in the lawn mowing category," iRobot's spokesman said in a statement to Reuters.
