Self-driving cars and taxis may be the future but they’re following in the footsteps of an autonomous vehicle that’s been trundling around here for years.
“The technology for (autonomous) lawnmowing is a lot further along than for autonomous vehicles,” said Brian LaTurno, New England regional sales manager for Husqvarna, a Swedish company that has sold self-driving lawnmowers since 1995, which is eight years before Tesla was founded.
LaTurno, who happened to be at Superior Power Equipment in Manchester when I called to pick their brains about the technology, said he wasn’t surprised I didn’t know this.
“The U.S. market has been very slow to adopt robotics. But in the last three years, competition has started to build up, and I think that has helped accelerate the sales we’re seeing,” he said.
Husqvarna is at the premium end of the market with a number of models for homeowners and businesses. Several other companies’ robot lawnmowers are showing up online, including one from Segway, which shed its New Hampshire roots and is now owned by a Chinese company.
They mostly operate on a pattern of continuous mowing, trundling out every day to clip a little bit off the top while leaving the cuttings behind, rather than chopping the grass in every week or so as we humans do.
They are, of course, more expensive than mowers you push yourself, but less than some of the speedy zero-turn mowers you see around. A robot lawnmower for a smallish yard is close to $1,000 at the low end, while multiple thousands for the fancy stuff. The selling point, of course, is that you don’t push them or ride on them. You can do something else entirely while the robot is keeping the yard tidy — although you will need to do some trimming around the edges where they don’t quite reach.
Colin Hughes, owner of ScenicView Landscapes, has replaced commercial mowing machines with robot mowers, of which he has 30. “We install these on people’s property. They stay there. I come in to trim, do the maintenance weekly, but the robots do the regular work,” he said.
I bring up this technology not to encourage you to cut the grass. We’re in No Mow May, the period of early spring when letting grass and weeds get a little long is a good idea, to help emerging pollinators.
Rather, it’s a reminder that technologies that might cause sweeping change, like self-driving cars, often percolate up from simpler versions. Such as Roomba. (By the way, don’t call your robot mower “my lawn Roomba” — they hate that.)
Remember how wild those round, self-propelled, not-very-effective vacuums seemed to us when they came out in 2002? People went crazy over this piece of The Jetsons entering daily life.
They were primitive by today’s standards, using bump-and-roll sensors to back up after colliding with something, but they showed what was possible. Just like the first Nissan Leaf, with its feeble range, showed for electric cars.
Today’s robot lawnmowers don’t depend on bump-and-roll. Husqvarna depends on radar and ultrasonic signals to avoid obstacles, while others may have cameras or LIDAR. There’s a similar spread of tech among autonomous cars over which sensors are best to keep on the straight and narrow.
Signals from base stations or an invisible “dog fence” may be used to keep robot mowers from wandering away, although they increasingly use GPS to stay within their assigned areas. They can also mow assigned patterns, from random to hatching like at Fenway Park to the Bruins logo in the grass.
Perhaps most significantly, these mowers are all electric vehicles; like Roombas they return to their home charging station to fuel up. That’s true for a reason.
Electric motors have better control over power distribution than internal-combustion engines, which makes them ideal for the real-time adjustments required by autonomous driving systems, and the batteries can provide power for all those electronic sensors and increasingly sophisticated software.
In other words, if we didn’t have EVs, we wouldn’t have robo-taxis.
I have no idea whether AI is going to sneak into robot mowers and, if so, what it might do. Farms already have robotic weed-zappers, which use lasers to kill weeds among rows of crops, using pattern matching from cameras to differentiate between good and bad vegetation. Maybe that will percolate down to homeowners. Maybe I can program them to feed the sheep and muck out the stall.
As for autonomous vehicles, they do seem to have arrived, but I don’t think they will ever have the impact that techbros predict. For technical and economic reasons, I predict that in 20 years, most of us will still be climbing behind the wheel every day and swearing at traffic, including occasional cars with nobody at the wheel.
But at least the lawn will be tidy when we get home.
