Tim Kubista, vice president sales and marketing for RC Mowers, discusses the role of autonomous and remote-operated mowers in the landscaping world.
Green Industry Pros: Talk to me a little more about RC Mowers.
Kubista: So, we have two products here. One is an autonomous mowing robot, and the other is a remote-operated robotic. Landscapers tell us that the No. 1 challenge they face is labor, and it's not the cost of labor, it's labor availability. So, how does this product (the autonomous mower) solve that problem? Well, we're removing the human from the mower. So, instead of a mowing crew of three people and three mowers showing up to do a job, one person shows up. The one person deploys three mowers. While they're mowing, they're string trimming, picking up garbage, blowing grass off sidewalks, and the mower is doing the heavy lifting on the repetitive work so it looks and acts just like a zero-turn mower. Anybody who can run a zero-turn mower can run this and to use autonomy.
You first mow a perimeter of the area you want to mow, and then on the inside of that perimeter, you might identify keep-outs, like flowers or a pond or large trees that you want to go around. Once that's done, that's your mowing plan. It's a perimeter with keep-outs. Then you just put the mowers in that plan, and they'll figure it out and mow it on their own, and you control the mower from your phone with an app. From your phone, you can change the speed. If it's nice flat ground, you might speed it up, but if it's rough and bumpy, you might slow it down. You can control the overlap from as little as a couple inches to up to 10- to 12-inch overlap. You can also change the direction. If the last time you mowed, you went north and south, and this time you wanted to go east and west, you just select that on your phone. Once the mowers are mowing, the operator stays in the area, and on his hip, he wears an emergency stop. If there's an incident, he can push the button, and all the mowers are stopped. Also, the mowers are really precise. They mow straighter than a human can mow. If you look at most jobsites that were mowed by human operators, there are big donuts around trees and signs because they're mowing too fast. The robot mows at an appropriate speed, so you're getting more precise results.
We have our customers put signs on jobsites that say this property is being mowed autonomously. An operator knows that a zero-turn, if you leave the seat, it will stop and it won't run, but passerby might not know. So, they see this machine without an operator, and (they think) it could be a renegade machine.
Green Industry Pros: In terms of the app, what else can it do?
Kubista: The app is something the operator uses to control the machine so they can manage mowing plans for all their properties. Control the mower, stop the mower, pause the mower. It'll give it alerts, like if it's running low on fuel. Everything the mower does is recorded in a data base, and so the owners back at their headquarters can log into a website and see mowing data for the mower, for crews, and be aware of productivity.
We want it to address the labor challenge. Switching to autonomy is very disruptive to the company, and so there's a lot of learning, and customers tend to get more productive as time goes on, but it takes constant monitoring to see what's working. We're not just selling a mower and saying, 'good luck.' Not only do we train their teams, but we actually have weekly meetings every single Friday with every single customer, where we're monitoring the data and analyzing it and helping them find ways to be more productive.
We come to the customer, and we go through three days of training. It starts with a very basic orientation, maintenance, we teach them how to run it, and then by the third day, we're stepping back. We're there, but we're 100 yards away. We're letting them work on their own, and then our constant meetings and phone calls are all about reinforcing everything we taught them.
Green Industry Pros: What else are you featuring?
Kubista: The remote-operated robotic mower is a completely different machine. It's designed for steep slopes, hazardous terrain, dikes, levees and retention ponds. So, it's not autonomous, it's remote controlled, and literally, it runs just like a remote-controlled car or toy. It's a niche business. So, if you think of traditional mowing, it's about selling. It is about price. The landscaper to be competitive has to have low operating cost. Most landscapers are charging $250 per hour to use this mower. One company I know, they were mowing a factory, with a big, steep hill four times a year, and they were doing it with string trimmers, and they charge $4,000. They got one of these mowers, and they did the whole thing in three hours, and now are charging $2,000. Think of that three hours worth of work for $2,000. The customer is getting it for that price, but the landscaper is making a lot of money.
Green Industry Pros: What makes it stable?
Kubista: First of all, the tracks. Look at how much surface area it has compared to a tire. That does a couple things. It significantly reduces the ground pressure. The ground pressure, measured in pounds per square inch, is lower than a human. That's how gentle it is on the turf. That's why it can go through water without sinking. It's also wide and low. It has a low center of gravity, so it can handle up to a 50-degree slope. Fifty degrees is so steep that it's really difficult for a human to even walk on it. You have to walk sideways. It's really the tracks and the low center of gravity that make it strong on steep slopes.
