AUTONOMOUS MOWERS
And then you start doing detail work; it’ s just a different workflow.”
Busse said that the technology is at a point where nearly anybody can operate it, with some training. The emphasis should be less on a person that has certain tech skills and more on their openness and willingness to adopt the new technology and vehicles.
CBQ agrees and said the software, like so much software today, is easy to use.“ But you have to be technology ready,” he said. Because Greenzie autonomous technology is installed on OEMbuilt equipment, if and when issues arise, users contact that manufacturer’ s customer service team initially. Greenzie technologists support that service effort. But work crews facing a problem need to know, he said, how to text and send pictures and video. You have to be familiar with texting and following directions on a tiny screen.“ I would say the technology barrier is pretty low.”
On the residential robot side, Baum is using the appeal of robots as a recruitment tool.“ A high school senior does a lot of my wireless-robot installs,” he said.“ A teacher from a local school district who is a robotics mentor is doing installations for me in the summer as well.”
All the professionals we spoke with agree that an interest in technology is much more important than a proficiency. That interest and the technology itself – still quite new and evolving rapidly – will change the future of the landscape workplace.“ People who are only working on robots,” said Langton,“ are a whole new class of workers in the space. Right now, I tried to work with a recruiter to hire for that and they were like, I don’ t even know what category to put this in because it’ s so new.”
Langton reinforces that this will lead to a new pay scale also.“ This change is not all about a labor shortage,” he said.“ It’ s about how can we start paying our laborers more. Stop telling them they are laborers. Tell them they are supervisors of the automation. When we do that, the people will adopt the automation. But right now, the people in the field don’ t want to adopt it because they think it’ s going to replace them and they just don’ t realize that it could actually make turn this job into a career.”
WHAT ' S NEW?
IT SEEMS LIKE ALMOST EVERYTHING is new when it comes to autonomous mowers. But there are degrees of newness: New in the last couple of years; New like“ coming soon;” and Newly available this season. Let’ s look at a couple in that category.
“ This is our first foray into autonomous,” said Exmark’ s Lenny Mangnall of the company’ s Turf Tracer with XIQ autonomous mower.“ And we’ re stepping into it cautiously … very mindful of safety and making sure we’ re doing things the right way.”
On a recent episode of the OPE People podcast, Mangnall talked about knowing the“ theoretical benefits” of the new mower. And that Exmark will continue to learn how autonomy aids the landscape contractor and the dealers. Mangnall said the manufacturer has done extensive training with its dealers on sales, service and demo units.
To develop the autonomous technology, Exmark stayed in house, using the expertise of a company Toro acquired in 2021 called Left Hand Robotics. Mangnall said Exmark has an advantage in owning the software development, and this improves the company’ s ability to react to customer needs. A Colorado-based company, Left Hand Robotics had developed an autonomous snowblower, a product line that is very important to Minnesota-based Toro.
Newer and lesser known is Havenshine, an autonomous technology provider based near Chicago that has developed, for one, the Sidekick“ semi-autonomous” mower. It mirrors the mowing work being done by a manually operated zero-turn mower running alongside it.
Ilya Sagalovich founded Havenshine in 2019 following years of work in robotics.“ I know of all the challenges with autonomous mowers and why they’ re not catching on as quickly as they should be,” he said.“ Sidekick essentially addresses all those challenges. It takes advantage of human capabilities, like vision, while still multiplying the efficiency.”
The Sidekick works primarily with the Mean Green electric zero-turn mowers, but it can be adapted to other brands. Sagalovich likes the electric ZTRs.“ The Sidekick is a very differentiated product because,” he said,“ instead of us trying to completely reinvent the human brain, we’ re simply saying, one human can supervise. This helps increase efficiency without sacrificing oversight.”
The Havenshine Sidekick at work.
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