When mowers sing “happy birthday” to Curiosity!

Ten years ago, on August 5 or 6 (depending on the spindle schedule), the Curiosity rover of the Nasa landed on Mars, in the Gale crater, after a breathless landing sequence. Curiosity’s goal was to demonstrate thehabitability from its landing site, which was also made possible by the Cnes ChemCam instrument. Ten years later, despite a damaged locomotion system, the rover continues its adventure. To date, he has traveled 382 kilometers and climbed 612 meters of elevation. It also acquired 494,540 images, drilled the ground 35 times and took 6 samples. It also returned some 3,102 GB of data from which 883 scientific papers were published.

To celebrate this anniversary, there are several ways. The classics, those which consist of listing the discoveries and carrying out assessment interviews and those called edutainment. Among all those brought to our attention, the Husqvarna initiative, world leader in lawn mowers robots, pleasantly surprised and amused us. Indeed, the brand has decided to celebrate the anniversary of the Curiosity rover, the loneliest robot in the world, by allowing its Automower® robotic mowers to sing a unique happy birthday to it.

Indeed, Husqvarna will set up a choir of robots earth to wish him a happy birthday in a rather surprising way. For this, Husqvarna has developed an update that will be available on a total of 100,000 Automower® mowers (models 405X, 415X and 435X AWD).

Behind the fun aspect, a nice technological performance

These mowers were obviously not designed to sing all the time. Behind this initiative there is a nice technological performance which consisted in updating the alarm module of the Automower® mower models concerned in order to make them sing this “happy birthday”.

“At Husqvarna, our engineering teams sometimes test new technologies out of sheer passion. It all started with our alarm module developed on the Automower mower® : we started experimenting around this feature to see if we could do something fun with it. In the meantime, we had heard about the Mars rover’s birthday approaching and the idea began to take shape little by little. It’s a way for us to pay tribute to the spectacular work carried out by NASA, while allowing our robot lawn mowers to celebrate another robot. Because no one should have to sing Happy Birthday to themselves, right? »says Björn Mannefred, Head of Software Robotics at Husqvarna.

How to join the choir?

Customers will be notified of the update via the Husqvarna Automower® Connect app, where an installation request will be sent. Consumers will then have the choice to accept or refuse it. By accepting it, their Automower® robotic lawn mower will automatically sing the Happy Birthday tune on August 5 at noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. (local time) to celebrate Curiosity’s 10 years on Mars.

After the Curiosity rover’s birthday, the birthday song will be made available to customers who own the three models of Automower® on a permanent basis from the beginning of September, to bring more joy to family birthdays.