Honda Reinvents Landscaping: The Autonomous Electric Mower is Here

Could your landscaping team show up and mow a large yard with an autonomous mower? They could if this new Honda autonomous mower enters production.

The new Honda mower will be featured at the upcoming Equip Expo at the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville, KY. This new mower is Honda’s first battery-powered electric zero-turn riding mower. This is the first such mower from Honda, but there’s much more to this story than simply an electric riding mower. This new mower could ride around a field or large yard without a driver in the seat. That’s the real story here.

Proving an autonomous solution

Can the landscaping team be more efficient? If you live in a neighborhood with regular lawn maintenance provided by the HOA fees that you pay, you typically see a team of workers making their way up and down the street with mowers, trimmers, and blowers. Imagine how much faster this team could work if the mowers could use hand-held equipment instead of being perched on top of a mower. Honda might have a solution for these landscaping teams to be able to come down off the mowers and begin to handle the job without a driver on the largest piece of equipment.

Proof of concept from Honda

Honda recently completed the proof of concept with a version of the new Autonomous Work Mower (AWM). They gave this mower to a top commercial landscape company and let them put it to work. The mower proved it could learn and handle the task, especially when mowing large fields and yards with acres of grass.

Next year, the AWM will enter a pilot program with several companies assessing the applicability of various work environments. Can this Honda autonomous mower handle the job with different yard shapes, sizes, and obstacles? We’ll get the answer to that question soon enough.

This Honda mower has several modes of operation

The Honda AWM can get the job done whether a driver is perched on the seat or not. When a driver chooses to operate this mower, the AWM offers excellent cutting performance, operator comfort, impressive accuracy, and obstacle detection. This mower is made to provide an eco-friendly solution as a zero-emissions mower that can be operated in manual or autonomous modes. When driven manually, the AWM learned the mowing routes and patterns set by the operator. This learning allows the machine to reproduce the routes and patterns when in its autonomous mode.

A mower to aid in carbon neutrality

Honda didn’t develop this autonomous mower to simply have a new mower for landscape companies. This new mower helps the brand work toward a global goal of achieving cabin neutrality with net-zero emissions for all products by 2050. Although that goal year seems pretty far in the future, companies working toward a similar goal must begin to focus on changing their products and production processes now to be successful. Honda will soon have an all-electric vehicle in the market as well, making it easy to see how this company is committed to making things better for the environment.

How does the mower learn the route?

Global Positioning Systems (GPS) have become more accurate, offering a near-pinpoint accuracy of location and directions. The new Honda AWM allows the operator to set up an autonomous system by using the mower and teaching it the route. This route is mapped using the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to ensure accurate location recognition. This enables the AWM to learn the mowing route and pattern to ensure the mower can duplicate this pattern during the next mowing cycle.

What does this mean for landscaping customers?

If the new Honda autonomous mower learns the patterns of several yards in a neighborhood, residents could be limited with changes they might want to make to their property. The AWM features sensors for obstacle detection and terrain variations, but Honda hasn’t provided information regarding how the mower will react and perform when a resident plants a new tree, flowerbed, or creates a new pathway in the yard. Most likely, new obstacles could require an operator to reload the route of the mower to reteach the machine where to mow.

This new Honda AWM enters autonomous mode when positioned at the starting point, and the operator enters “Playback” mode after downloading the specified mowing route from a tablet or smartphone. The mower does the job of cutting the grass while the operator is left to handle other duties. This new Honda autonomous mower can make a landscaping team much more efficient, allowing the team to mow more areas during a given day.