We Built a GPS-Guided, Wire-Free Robot Mower for Large Lawns
by Yarbo | 2025-11-13 12:23:56+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Noor, part of the product team at Yarbo, where we’re building modular outdoor robots that handle lawn care, snow removal, and yard maintenance all using the same autonomous drive base.

We recently finished a full-season field test of our wire-free, GPS-guided robot mower, and wanted to share what we’ve built, the technology behind it, and what we learned from real users maintaining large lawns.

The Real Problem We Wanted to Solve Almost every robot mower on the market still depends on buried perimeter wires.

For homeowners with large or complex lawns (½ acre and up), those wires are frustrating — they take hours to install, frequently break, and make even small landscaping changes painful.

We saw this problem repeatedly in user feedback: “The mower works fine until a wire gets nicked — then I have to dig up half my lawn to find the break.”

We wanted to remove wires entirely while keeping centimeter-level accuracy and full autonomy. That meant solving for GPS drift, multi-zone mapping, and reliability under trees or next to buildings all conditions that break most wireless mowers today.

What We Built We developed a wire-free, GPS-RTK + Vision Fusion robot mower that can map and maintain large yards with precision, using what we call PPVS (Precise Positioning Vision System).

It runs on Yarbo’s modular robot (yarbo.com) base the same drive unit that powers our snow blower, leaf blower, and sweeper modules giving users year-round functionality from one machine.

Core Technology Stack - RTK-GPS for centimeter-level position correction.

- IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and wheel odometry for dead-reckoning between GPS fixes.

- Stereo vision and AI-based obstacle detection for navigating uneven or cluttered terrain.

- SLAM mapping and path optimization for efficient coverage without overlap.

- Cloud + App integration for over-the-air updates, digital zone editing, and smart scheduling.

This combination allows Yarbo’s mower to mow precisely along digital boundaries, switch mowing zones via app, and automatically adjust its path when signal conditions change.

Real-World Testing and Feedback We ran multi-week tests with users in the U.S., Canada, and Northern Europe regions with large, complex lawns and frequent signal interference from trees or slopes.

A few takeaways from the field: - Large-property users saved 5–6 hours monthly compared to traditional mowing or wire-bound robots.

- Winter transitions were seamless they swapped the mowing module for the snow blower and kept using the same robot base.

- Connectivity resilience mattered more than aesthetics; users valued reliability under difficult GPS conditions.

“For the first time, I didn’t have to fix wires or restart the robot mid-session. It just worked.”

Challenges We’re Still Solving - Multipath errors during heavy rain still cause minor GPS drift; we’re improving our adaptive filters.

- Vision misreads under low light we’re testing infrared-assisted edge detection.

- RTK base-station cost exploring ways to use low-cost local corrections for smaller lawns.

Why This Solves a Real Problem Most “smart” mowers fail on scalability. A system that works on a 500 sq ft patch doesn’t scale to a 1-acre yard with trees, slopes, and multiple zones. Yarbo’s platform was designed for real users with real yards people managing large outdoor spaces who don’t want to spend weekends maintaining them.

By removing physical boundaries and unifying yard tasks across seasons, Yarbo is moving robotic yard care from a novelty to a truly practical tool.

Try It / Feedback Welcome We’ve shared a short technical walkthrough and demo video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-gPpJU7w3U