Look at the cover image: the gentle slopes, the green meadows, the sunlit hills singing. Beautiful, isn’t it? But have you ever tried mowing grass uphill with this?

Well, I do. Let me tell you, it’s not a pleasant experience. Not so much because of the physical effort involved but rather because of everything that comes with it.

Before you even start mowing the grass, you have to hope that the machine will start. The internal combustion engine is a robust and reliable device, but it hides many pitfalls for us Millennials who have grown up in the comforts of technology.

Let me tell you a story: you wake up early, happy to be able to spend a morning outdoors keeping your lawn manicured, because you like green and nature. You have a good breakfast and with the best of intentions you head to your shed where your beloved motor sickle, which from now on we will call Daisy, is waiting for you.
The last time you used it you cleaned and greased it, so you are relaxed: a check of the oil and petrol and you are ready to go.
You turn the button to ON, open the air, grab the cord and pull. Nothing. You try again with more force, still nothing. After five minutes of pulling and choking, you realise that something is wrong.

Your patience has already reached its limit, but you take a deep breath and try to think: maybe the filter is not clean? When did I last change the spark plug? Is petrol getting to the engine? You check everything and clean everything properly, doing a thorough and meticulous job. At this point an hour has already passed, but it doesn’t matter, you can still recover, let’s not ruin the spirit. With renewed confidence, you try the ignition again. One shot, two, three. It does not ignite, just a few measly bursts and nothing more.

At that very moment the only solution that goes through your head is to kick Daisy and ask her why she won’t start. You would even be about to do it, if at that moment he didn’t show up: the patriarch.
Born in the 20th century, the golden age of mechanical engine. While computer science and electronics had yet to be born or were in their infancy, he was already dismantling and reassembling engines, cleaning filters and welding metal. He doesn’t fix engines, he talks to engines.
He goes up to Daisy, tweaks something, pulls the cord and broom, it starts. You didn’t understand anything that happened, it seems like he did random things that you had already done. But the difference is that now Daisy is crackling happily while you have a twitch in your eye. You don’t know whether to be happy that you can finally start mowing the lawn or to rail against the patriarch who happily walks away with his usual saying ‘the mechanics are unforgiving’.

Now Daisy is finally on, but the best is yet to come: you have to watch out for nettles, for branches on the ground that could cause the vehicle to tip over, check that the grass doesn’t get stuck in the wheel hubs. You also have to be careful, and this is very important, that Daisy doesn’t betray you, making sure that the gear is always engaged, otherwise neutral comes in and who’s holding Daisy with her nice 100kg and more downhill.

So you arrive at lunchtime. You’re mentally and physically already cooked, you’re only halfway through and you have to finish in the day because the next day you’re working and the grass might get too high, making work more tiring than it is now. You switch off Daisy hoping that it will come back on in the afternoon and you set off to eat.

In the 21st century, an era dominated by robots and artificial intelligence, all this is anachronistic. From the ashes of dozens of days like the ones I have told you about, Giustino was born, the automatic mowing robot for slopes and difficult terrain. It will be an epic of challenges of all kinds, from mechanics to robotics via artificial intelligence. Let the journey begin.

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