Lawns are pretty to look at but dubious environmentally and imprisoning socially. As long as we have them, however, it’s no surprise the makers of Roomba would like to extend their robot helpers to the out of doors as automatic mowers–lawnbots. The problem is that the proposed system would make it difficult for astronomers to conduct their work with ginormous radio telescopes. From Davey Alba at Wired:

WHO CAN HATE a Roomba? Astronomers, that’s who.

The robotic vacuums we all know and love ensure we don’t have to clean our own homes ourselves to get them spotless. (God forbid.) Now, the Roomba’s maker, iRobot, wants to do for lawn care what it did for vacuuming. According to filings with the FCC spotted by IEEE Spectrum, iRobot is designing a robotic mower—news that should elate lazy people the world over.

But one group is really, really unhappy about this boon to the slothful: Astronomers. Some of them are so upset, in fact, that their objections might put the kibosh on the whole thing. How could this be? In a scenario that sounds straight out of the Golden Age of scifi, it all comes down to robots versus telescopes, and how they all communicate.•