This video comes courtesy of Kevin Groba who has been using ArduPilot Rover (ver 3.3) to automate a zero-point turn (aka skid steering) gas powered lawn mower. The ongoing discussion of this mower is here.
This is a Scag Patriot 60 mower with a Cube (aka Pixhawk2) autopilot. Kevin has used heavy duty servos to physically move the levers on the mower.
Congrats Kevin on this great progress and helping with beta testing the latest versions of the software!
GG. I would like to refer to another user who has also done it on hiw lawn mower and has published a series of youtube videos about it:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkIJQFyZdzLKh7AR-m3t2Bw
(Kenny Trussel)
Hugues, wow, fantastic, thanks!
Thanks, Hugues, for the reference! I hope to publish a lot more soon. Working on a change to LoRa for the RTCM3 corrections from base to rover (but unrelated priorities have slowed me down!). Meanwhile, I really look forward to learning what Kevin Groba has done!
I ordered one of these RC mowers from Evatech. I will be attaching a pixhawk 2.1 and Here+ GPS RTK to it. Thank you for giving me inspiration.
Vincent,
Interesting mower. I guess Evatech doesn’t ship their vehicle with ArduPilot but I wonder if they would consider it. In any case, looking good!
EDIT: I had a look at some videos so definitely looks like a skid-steering vehicle. it’ll be interesting to see how it goes, it should work fine of course.
That does look very nice. Please keep us posted on your progress.
Took nearly three months to get build and delivered, but its finally here!
Making a plan for pixhawk integration…
great, looking forward to hearing how it goes!
Super excited to see this. I really appreciate your detailed explanation of your plans. Looking forward to seeing the outcome.
Very egger to get a video of it mowing but I think its going to rain most of the week here. Our mowing season has been going through November the past few years, so I should get many chances to tune the navigation.
You are welcome to take a short drive to my place (central Georgia). I have a LOT to mow! 
I still have some tweaking to do to try and get straighter lines and get the mower back on the path faster. Do you know if I can tune the parameters while on a mission and have it take those parameters without restarting? I was going to let it run a long mission and tweak it while it runs.
Yes, you can tune away while in auto on a mission.
Vincent,
that’s looking pretty good! It’s a good candidate for a reference frame page on our wiki because the mower itself is readily available. If you’re interested in providing the info for the page I could write it up for you. This offer applies to KevinG or anyone else for that matter.
Navigation changes to make more sure that it doesn’t leave any grass unmowed is something we need to think about. the GPS accuracy is one issue but that’s not all of the problem. I have been thinking of adding a “MAP” mode to rover… I was planning to use it for mapping with boats but it might also work for mowing…
What infomation do you need for documentation? I’ll do what I can to advance this use of Ardupilot.
Vincent,
The important bits are:
This is probably the newest reference frame page so it gives an idea of the kind of thing we should include.
This sounds good. I sent an email to Luis Medina , CEO of Evatech (http://www.evatech.net/), to ask for permission first. I also asked for the official pin layout of their speed controller. It was easy to follow the servo lines to make it work, but having an official layout could be valuable. I let you know how Luis responds.
vince
Talked to Luis today and he is ok with us adding a reference page for Evatech. He also said he will share the speed controller pin layout so we can add it to the documentation. Evatech has been pursuing an autopilot solution so this fits in with their plans.
