Most of my property is still too wet for Yarbo to cut. Gotta wait until the crazy early spring rain dies down.
That said, the grass is growing and needs to be cut…
So I went out and mapped out some new temporary work areas that are dry enough for Yarbo to mow. And I’m pleased to say he’s out performing his first mow of the year right now. It’s only a small portion of my overall property, but something’s better than nothing! And Yarbo is the one that’s getting the work done for me.
I’m sitting on my patio relaxing right now, watching Yarbo while my next door neighbor is cutting his yard with his John Deere.
Today things are drying out enough for Yarbo to cut more of my back yard. FINALLY! Still just a small portion, but we’re getting there.
I created temporary work areas that are dry enough to mow. My maps are super confusing right now as a result. Can’t wait until I can delete the temp areas!
I’m running with the new NetRTK feature, and so far so good. I haven’t noticed any issues or problems thus far, but of course it’s still early to say conclusively it’s rock solid. Early impressions are… NetRTK works just as accurately as normal RTK for me.
I was talking to a neighbor about having my Yarbo do some testing in one of his pasture areas. NetRTK will come in quite handy for that.
So far, so good on today’s mowing run. I’m really curious to see what happens when it’s time for Yarbo to dock though. I think that’s where NetRTK and accuracy might be put to the test.
The good news: Yarbo took care of today’s mowing job with ease.
Despite using NetRTK, there were nice straight rows, good cut quality. And a perfect job docking. I honestly cannot perceive any issues or problems using NetRTK so far. Great work!
The bad news: It’s now pouring rain outside yet again! So much for my yard drying out…
I thought of a couple of suggestions to improve Yarbo’s NetRTK implementation…
First, I think when the user activates NetRTK for the first time, the software should automatically perform a map drift correction. It shouldn’t be a non-mandatory step that a user can disregard. Only allow NetRTK to be activated while on the charger, and then perform the correction. Simple. And eliminates potential point of failure.
Second, I’d like to see an automatic failover feature. If NetRTK is active and for some reason the signal drops, fall back to traditional RTK. I like the idea of an automatic redundancy.
While I agree map drift correction being auto would be nice, I think forcing it to be on the dock for switching to NetRTK is limiting. Someone may simply want to switch and remap. Maybe they don’t have a dock because they drove to another location and will create a temp map and restore from saved later.
Two, failover won’t be possible because of the map drift issue. Any time you change the base station of reference, you have to reorient the map to the reference point. There is some redundancy on the NetRTK side of things I am told. But if you are on NetRTK and you lose internet, you got to drive back to the dock, switch to DC and then correct for map drift and then you are back in business.
So what happens if your Yarbo is in the middle of your yard, and you decide to switch RTK methods? The maps won’t be usable until you dock and perform a drift correction? Maybe then a strict warning should be presented to avoid an end user clicking it and now their Yarbo can’t be used until they perform the drift correction.
ideally I still think an automatic drift correction would be the most user friendly process.
