Like a Roomba vacuum for the yard (and created by Joe Jones, inventor of the Roomba), Tertill is a solar-powered robot that lives in your vegetable or flower garden and takes care of weeds as they appear. It can tell the difference between a plant you want and one you don’t simply by height: Weeds are short and plants are tall. If a plant is short enough to fit underneath Tertill, the string trimmer turns on. It connects to a smartphone via Bluetooth and is built with four-wheel-drive to roll itself around in the soil and get rid of weeds without using chemicals.
The little, green 2.5-pound bot isn’t yet in production, but contributors to its Kickstarter can see for themselves how well it works when it’s released next spring.
