Meet Tertill – he’s your new best friend. He can weed and scare garden pests away. He’ll do it day after day, month after month without pay. And you don’t even have to feed him ‘coz he’s solar powered!
How good can it get? All you need to do now is get Tertill talking with your robotic lawn mower, home vacuum cleaner and your automatic pool cleaner and you can sit back and relax. Just set and forget!
Automated weed killers have been hot property for at least the last five years. But so far, the technology has been all around drones that are able to recognize larger noxious weeds such as prickly acacia. Such drones have been in use here in Australia since 2013.
Saving our crocodiles!
What say! Indeed… in the Kimberley region of North-Western Australia there is an extremely invasive introduced weed called stinking passionflower. It’s so dense it’s stopping crocodiles from being able to nest. State-of-the-art LiDAR drones are being used to survey the extent of the weed for further analysis!
Our new mate, Tertill, is the first ‘domesticated’ robotic weed killer we’re aware of. He’s compact. Dimensions are only 8.25 x 8.25 x 4.75 in (210 x 210 x 121 mm) while only weighing 2.5 lbs (1.1 kg). He’s fitted with a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) chip, a solar panel on top and a Li-Ion rechargeable battery. He’s even got a USB port for backup charging. And he’s got that all important 4×4 drive to keep him from getting stuck in soft soil, sand or mulch.
That extreme camber on those wheels is the result of exhaustive testing. It keeps Tertill going up hill and down dale, rain, hail or shine… power permitting 🙂
The downside is that Tertill can only manage about 100 square feet (9m2) by himself. If your garden is bigger you’ll need another Tertill. The upside is that your Tertills will communicate with each other so that they don’t cover the same ground twice!
Tertill’s developer is the same genius who invented Roomba, the first commercialized robotic vacuum cleaner so he’s got the right genes.
While I love the concept, I’ll be waiting for Tertill’s big brother. I’ve got about an acre of gardens here and even my vege patch would need a small Tertill army. So until Arnietill arrives, I’d better get back to the weeding 🙂
If you want to know more about this project, visit Franklin Robotics…
