Last Updated on January 30, 2024 by Brian Beck
I had a meeting today with the Colorado State Smart Cities Alliance. It is an organization that is adopting green technologies and automation in an attempt to this place carbon emissions and create efficiency through modern technology. This can be a pretty heated topic and certainly controversial with a lot of debate but I want to pose a question. I was making the case for robotic automation. I wrote a blog about this over a year ago stating numerous examples of improvement upon existing technologies. You can read that at the link below if you want. I had prepared a small comparison sheet of some of the simple metrics between two mowers one of them pictured above, that beautiful red machine and the one below which is a robotic mower. The first mower costs around $130,000, weighs as much as a large truck, and burns about two and half gallons per hour. While it is highly productive and can quickly mow several acres of turf per hour, it can burn through over $10,000 a year in fuel, takes almost a couple thousand dollars maintenance and must be operated by an individual who is probably costing the company upwards of $30,000 to operate the machine and is limited to the capacities of the human being. It’s a big machine very well engineered, highly productive and very expensive to operate. It certainly does not take this much energy to cut the tips of a blade of grass.
The other machine pictured below costs around $35,000, weighs less than a couple hundred pounds, and operates on about 300W of energy. While it is productive in its own right it’s advantage is a little bit more dynamic. It can manage up to 20 acres working 24 hours a day, requiring less than a few hundred dollars in maintenance typically per year and is completely autonomous. Comparing these two mowers is essentially comparing the tortoise to the hare. In essence the lawn is constantly mowed as it is maintaining an already cut lawn that never gets long. Slow and steady wins the race and much more productivity can be achieved in conditions that are prohibitive for a large fuel-burning machine. Over time the cost savings from operating such machine overwhelmingly justifies its purpose as it displaces a drastic amount of wasted energy both mechanical and human that can be devoted elsewhere in a work effort. These cost savings are things that require serious consideration as time is money and time is irreplaceable. Things are changing and we are helping to drive the change by adopting new technology. I think the future looks very exciting and highly productive.
https://www.springslawns.com/the-case-for-automation-robotic-mowing/