Robot Design

In this post, I will try to highlight some of the design considerations when during the concept design for the Heibjerg Robot. Working with the industrial designer Anders Klitgaard. I will also show some of the early sketches of the product. They are really good so it would be a shame to hide them.

Working With an Industrial Designer

The robot design is done by Anders Klitgaard an amazing industrial designer and skilled engineer. Having designed countless products, in various stages of development, he had lots of insights into product development. As we are still developing our prototype, it is a bit of an astatic mess. There are several reasons for this. We are still in the process of finding the optimal sensors and refining our steamer. So the current prototype is bulkier, weirdly colored, and changing daily. This is not the optimal image to spark interest in the product.

First you must sell the dream, then the product

Anders got this, or rather he told us. After a bit of back and forth, he came up with several design proposals.

First Iteration of Design

The most important part was that it should be clear that this is not a lawn mower. Its function should be illustrated, and if possible it should be shown that it also was targeted toward gravel areas. He made several design suggestions, of which 4 are illustrated above. After showing the illustrations to a handful of people we decided to take the "glass" feature. This might not be included in the final version if deemed too expensive. It does do an excellent job of piquing the interest and illustrating that this is not a lawn mower. So it conveyed the concept perfectly.

Second Iteration

Anders when back to the drawing board and refined the concept to the one above. This design I showed this to a lot of people. I needed to confirm that my hunches were correct. It should spark interest. And after a hard week, trying to steer every conversation I was in over to garden robots, I got some great feedback. The final iteration was to give it a bit of modern coloring and feel.

Final Version

You have properly seen the final version on the webpage already, but here they are again for reference.

Final Remarks

The main motivation for writing this post was to show off some of the early sketches. Even though they are not prominently displayed on the website they have given much value in refining the concept. Anders was amazing to work with and did so many drawings. There are many more, but they must see the light of day, another time. The final concept illustration does an amazing job of attracting interested parties. I will go more into detail in another post.