Kobi is attempting to make laborious garden tasks much more enjoyable, taking the concept of robotic vacuum cleaners outside into the fresh air.
The robot can carry out tasks including cutting the lawn and clear snow from paths and driveways autonomously, meaning you won’t even need to tell it where to cut or get ploughing.
However, it does come with a smartphone app, so you can take over the controls if you feel it’s wandering off course. It connects up via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and with a training mode, you can teach the robot exactly where it can roam, making sure it doesn’t miss any parts of your lawn. This mentoring programme will also allow you to teach it where obstacles are, so it can learn to miss bumping into your trees or avoid for award-winning blooms.
Whats really smart about Kobi is it’ll use your smartphone to offer warnings about weather – for example if there’s about to be a huge dump of snow, so you can prepare for clearance.
It’ll give real-time updates too, so if it tells you the light sprinkling of snow is about to turn into a full-scale blizzard, you can make sure Kobi is put to work before it’s too deep for the little ‘bot to get working, saving a whole lot of effort later.
Kobi is charged up via a docking station and comes equipped with an anti-theft mode, which will mean your neighbours won’t be able to steal him without everyone knowing. You’ll probably want to keep the robot as close as you can to you, because at £3,200, it’s a hefty price to pay.
It’ll go on sale in the US in early 2017, but will hopefully follow in Europe soon after.
