The obvious goal of maintaining a zen garden is to find inner peace and comfort — hence the zen — as you rake intricate designs and patterns into the sand. But for some people, that zen actually comes from sitting in a lawn chair with a cold drink in hand while a custom-built robot called the Zen Gardner does all the work.
Specifically, those people would be Jared and Joey Ficklin, who designed and built the remote-controlled Zen Gardner to drag along a set of tines that leave parallel lines in the sand as it roams about. Is it cheating? There’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to what’s zen, and beating the system has to feel pretty good. [YouTube via Make]