Automatic lawn mower vehicle

DETAILED DESCRIPTION An automatic mower vehicle is comprised of a drive-wheel assembly, a trailing sulky carrying an electrical power source, and a hinge having a vertical axis.
The hinge has one part and another part hingedly connected to each other.
The one hinge part is fastened to the drive-wheel assembly while the another hinge part is attached to the trailing sulky at a hitch end thereof.
The drive-wheel assembly has fixedly mounted thereto a single drive wheel that alone supports this assembly on the ground.
The drive wheel is positioned directly below the hinge and is driven by an electrical drive-wheel motor that is also mounted to the drive-wheel assembly.
A grass cutter is also mounted to the drive-wheel assembly.
The one hinge part is preferably a cylindrical bearing and the another hinge part is a cylindrical post fitted inside the bearing.
The above combination of mechanical features is uniquely well suited for allowing the placement of a plurality of cutters about the drive wheel that maintain a fixed position relative to the drive wheel even when the drive-wheel assembly and thus the drive wheel itself turns with respect to the trailing sulky.
For example, in a preferred arrangement of cutters, a pair of cutters are positioned equi-distant from the central plane of the drive-wheel and one and the opposite sides respectively of the drive wheel while other cutters in combination with the pair of cutters all have overlapping areas of cut to form a combined cutting area that is an arc of more than 180 degrees.
With this cutter arrangement, the cut grass wake produced behind the moving mower vehicle is always equally wide from any point in the path of the drive wheel however the vehicle may have been turning.
This feature renders the mower vehicle of this invention especially suitable for use as a completely automatic guided-path mower, e.
g.
one that follows a continuous wire buried a few inches under the ground patterned to guide the mower along many parallel paths for cutting a lawn, whereby the "rules" for guiding along many straight and turning mutually parallel paths becomes greatly simplified, namely all paths everywhere will be equi-distant from the adjacent paths