Crop circles - the mystery is solved!

Several of my Clients have robot mowers: automatic mowing machines that trundle around your lawn, on a pretty much continual basis, mincing up the grass into tiny little pieces.

They work fantastically if your lawn is large, and is a fairly simple shape, and although they are pretty expensive to buy and to have installed, they do mean that you will never again have to push the mower round, or have to dispose of piles of grass clippings. 

And your lawn is always, always, perfect.

If you've never encountered them, they are great fun to watch: the installers sink a control wire all round the perimeter of the lawn, which acts as an electric fence to keep them in, and to prevent them wandering off the lawn and eating your flowers. They are programmed to bumble around at random within that area, turning back whenever they encounter the wire:  or whenever they bump into anything, such as wheelbarrows, garden furniture, or my boots, while I am working.

When their battery starts to run low, they drive themselves back to their charging port, and plug themselves in - so you never have to rescue a forlorn, exhausted robo-mower from the far end of the garden.

The programming seems to be quite simple: there must be some sort of algorithm to prevent them doing the same patch over and over again, but otherwise they wander around like motorised sheep, randomly covering the area, and eating continuously.

One elderly gentleman calls his one Lorna (Lawn-er, get it?), and says that he enjoys sitting in his conservatory, watching her working out how to get out of the corners: he says it's just like when his grandchildren were very small.

Elsewhere, I have a Client whose robot mower seems to like me, because although it is a very large garden, within minutes of me starting to work, the mower bumps into my ankles. And quite often, it will change direction to intercept me, as I walk around the garden. The owner says I am imagining it. I am not so sure. 

Anyway, the other day, I was highly amused to see this:

It was going round in circles! Creating a lovely crop circle in the grass! 

I thought it had got stuck, so I put my foot in front of it, which forced it to stop, twiddle round, and head off in another direction. 

But seconds later, there he was (I'm pretty sure this one is a boy, as he seems to have a fatal attraction for me), going round in circles again!

Fascinated, I bumped him off course again, and watched: he ran off in a straight line, then stopped: hesitated: went backwards a short distance: then started to turn hard right, and after a couple of revolutions, started spiralling outwards.

Apparently they can sense the length of the grass, so if they encounter a patch which is longer than the surrounding grass, they give it special attention until it is evenly short again, at which point they return to their straight-line wanderings.

But it is kind of fun, watching them creating beautiful crop circles in the lawn!

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