Mowing the lawn is getting a high-tech upgrade, thanks to robots and AI.
The “cool part is we didn’t need to teach this anything. There’s just an on/off button, and it’s semantically aware of its surroundings,” explained Jarrett Herold, co-founder of Electric Sheep.
Recently, we met up at Vista Del Valle Park in La Habra to watch his electric sheep mow the giant lawns at the park.
“Rather than a guy sitting on top of a machine just going back and forth in straight lines, we’ve handed off those workflows to our robots,” said Herold.
Their quiet, all-electric mowers are programmed with AI that gets smarter with every job.
“They’re robots that have common sense. That’s where AI comes in. So they really just have to be set down and pointed in the right direction and you hit start,” said Herold.
The bots are deployed alongside landscaping crews who can focus on other tasks like trimming, edging and blowing.
“It’s hard to hire people to do this work essentially,” said Herold.
Right now they’re operating at campuses, parks and more. These bots are for commercial applications, although I’ve seen similar robots you can purchase for home use.
“It’s been interesting,” started Ed Nolan, HOA President at Villa Point Condos in Newport Beach.
They’ve been using the robots for a few months there.
He got interested in the robots for their electric appeal – less noise and better for the environment.
“When I came to California 10 years ago, I would never believe that I would be driving an electric car. But I think it’s good. I think it’s good. I think it’s more efficient,” said Nolan, who added that he believes the robots will do an even better job as they are upgraded with better software and hardware.
Of course, whenever you have self-learning, autonomous robots with razor-sharp blades on them, safety is a top concern.
A “key aspect is it has a stereo camera in the front, and it’s able to identify things that it needs to stay away from,” explained Herold.
To test that theory, I stepped in front of the moving robot (don’t try this at home!) and it did indeed stop and turn around. They’ve been trained using AI and thousands of images of things like people and animals.
But a key question: will these automated bots cut out humans in another way?
“It’s it’s not meant to be a labor displacement. It’s meant to work alongside humans to compound their productivity,” concluded Herold.
It’s the standard answer I’ve gotten from pretty much every company that has ever automated a human job.
How do these electric sheep compare to humans?
It was tough to tell from the demos I saw since the grass was already pretty well maintained.
But, unlike a Roomba which might go in a haphazard direction, these lawnmowers are meant to give you those great-looking lawn stripes.
