THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 8, 1995 TAG: 9507070581
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 54 lines
Whenever I hear something about robotic lawn mowers - which seem to be creeping into our grass-tending civilization - I have a positive reaction and perhaps a fantasy or two.
This is carrying technology where it ought to go. No lifting of periodic drudgery (both summer and winter for someone who seeds every fall) could be more welcome.
I've even heard of one ingenious apparatus (being test-marketed some months back by a big maker of yard equipment) that operated on solar power, worked without human supervision through computerized controls, would test grass for wetness and height and then would tootle around with its quiet blades whenever necessary, all without straying beyond its buried-wire perimeter.
Contributing to the satisfaction of operating some such contrivance would be a number of benefits, which in my dream mode I regularly enumerate.
One, obviously, would be the reduction in wear and tear on human muscles.
Another would be the sheer esthetic pleasure of watching rough, irregular turf being turned - swathe after automatic swathe - into a neatly manicured piece of greensward. With no human exertion (beyond the manipulation of levers if the device were directed by remote controls). Of course, things might not be quite so neat and there might be a little fringe havoc - in things mowed that shouldn't be - if some adjustment should not be right. But such deviant behavior could be corrected ultimately and, in any event, could be blamed on something other than you or me, which would be quite an advantage in itself.
A related benefit would be the lifting of grass-day as an impending gloomy spot (maybe two) in the contemplation of each summer week's schedule of events and obligations.
Another thing: Putting the mower owner at some distance from the scene of blade action, with its kicking-up of chaff and molds and dust, would eliminate a lot of dosing with anti-allergy medications.
A corollary to this would be a lightening of the laundry load, since the human involved could stay spanking clean.
A couple of particular rewards for me - doubtless, other yard serfs could come up with something comparable - would be the escape from entanglement (having headgear whipped off and flesh cruelly lashed or speared on occasion) with the low limbs of a couple of stubbornly unmoving dogwood trees and with the steel-thorned branches of our jealously territorial pyracantha bush. A robot could care less about such things.
These make a nice array of pluses.
And minuses? What minuses? MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. by CNB