The smart home has well and truly escaped the bounds of its traditional four walls

Husqvarna’s higher-end grass-munching bots can easily manage a fairly significant slope.

Those of us lucky enough to have them have become intimately attached to our gardens in this past year. They’re a home away from home – and given that those same four walls get a little samey, a safe-space trip to the great outdoors is a real tonic. The garden is now more than a patch of grass out the back, it’s a viable room in its own right, with all the modern conveniences we’ve come to expect.

It should come as no surprise that the burgeoning smart home is expanding outward into this new room at pace, ready to offer you smarter garden management, better connectivity and a whole host of new kit to tie into your existing routines; if you’re committed to your outdoor space, you can even find full-on entertainment rigs ready and raring to annoy your neighbours as you put your feet up on the patio.

Go, go, robo mow

Smart mowers may be the big headline grabbers of the smart garden world, but don’t be so hasty to presume that a robo-mower is a ‘drop on your lawn and go’ solution. There are a lot of factors fighting against automated grass management, not least of which is your lawn itself. Let’s consider the way a Roomba (other vacuum bots are available) navigates inside your home to work out why: they can barely deal with scaling the edge of a rug, can’t even consider stairs (though we don’t rule out a Dalek-like hovering evolution in the future) and wouldn’t be too happy with an undulating surface. Vacuum bots use cameras, lasers, and bump sensors to pick out the edges of a room and map it. That is all comparatively easy compared to what a robot is likely to face in your garden, unless you’ve been manicuring until now with nail scissors and a spirit level; lawns vary massively, light levels constantly change, and finding the difference between a path, border and stretch of grass requires advanced smarts, or at least a good memory.