US 9,137,943 B2 · Trainable autonomous lawn mower

Abstract

The present invention proposes a profound user-mower interaction, which enables the user to teach a robotic lawn mower for improving its visual obstacle detection. The main idea of the invention is that the user can show some typical obstacles from his garden to the mower. This will increases the performance of the visual obstacle detection. In the simplest scenario the user just places the mower in front of an obstacle, and activates the learning mechanism of the classification means (module) of the mower. The increasing use of smart devices such as smart phones or tablets enables also more elaborated learning. For example, the mower can send the input image to the smart device, and the user can provide a detailed annotation of the image. This will drastically improve the learning, because the mower is provided with ground truth information.

Claims21

Dependent claims

A robotic lawn mower comprising:

at least one camera for obtaining an input image;
a memory for storing information about obstacles;
a classifier module of a computing unit connected to the memory, for segmenting obstacles within the input image supplied from the camera and identifying segmented obstacles based on the information stored in the memory;
and
a control unit for controlling a movement of the mower based on the identification of at least one obstacle;
wherein the classifier module is provided with an interface in order to edit the information stored in the memory upon acceptance of user input,
wherein the robotic lawn mower is configured to send a message containing a snapshot image taken by the at least one camera to a remote smart device preferably using a wireless channel, and
receive information about an annotated snapshot image from the smart device as user input.

5 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Trainable autonomous lawn mower

Life of this patent

Trainable autonomous lawn mower

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims21