Robot mowers, or to give them their full name, robotic lawnmowers, are the next step towards smart homes.

They’re designed and marketed at the moments to simply prevent you from having to go out into the garden and mow the lawn yourself. That drastically reduces the time required to be spent on lawn care in general, leaving only sprinkling a bit of seed and pulling up the odd weed as required.

The idea is that once they’re un-boxed and away, they’re pretty much autonomous in their duties, doing their thing from Spring to Autumn, and possibly even through winter if required, although that’s probably not necessary in the UK.

Massive breakthroughs in battery technology has overcome some of the issues facing early automatic mowers, which struggled to complete large lawns in one sweep. Instead they used to remember where they ran low on power, returned to charge on their base plate and then continued later to finish the job.

Now though, they’re benefiting from much more powerful cells, coupled with more efficient power management to achieve more and more before needing to recharge.

That means they’re now able to handle almost any garden and lawn, big or small. Very few home-owners will find that their plots are beyond the scope of modern mowers, even if they do still need to divide and conquer to complete the task at hand. After all, who really cares if it’s not you doing it yourself?

As we said earlier, this is a road towards the smart home getting ever smarter. It’s already available, but more and more commonly home-owners are able to track their mower from their phone via apps. Of course, that means that just like the heating (and doorbell), the features of the device can be controlled from anywhere in the world (assuming you have wifi or mobile signal).

No doubt the technology that the brands create will continue to grow and evolve, and who knows what else will be added. Perhaps we’ll get to the point where lawns can be kept hydrated by sprinkling water as they mow, or perhaps doing the weeding and feeding at the same time. One thing is for sure, it’s the biggest step forward in home mowing and lawn care in decades.