Making the cut: Robot mower touches down in London area

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If George Jetson had a front lawn, he would have had a robot to cut the grass for him.

The space-age cartoon answer to that chore may be a long way off yet for most homeowners, but one Southwestern Ontario town has already taken that step, with Strathroy-Caradoc recently buying what’s believed to be the first automated lawnmower robot in the region.

The idea of testing the technology came to Rob Lilbourne, Strathroy-Caradoc’s director of community services, after he read an article describing how the robot mower, developed by Echo Robotics, was being used by a golf course in Calgary.

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The municipality then partnered with the Strathroy United Football Club to test the machine for about a month at Strathroy’s Yorkview Community Park to see what kind of benefits it would provide. The park has two full-size and three smaller soccer pitches.

“The club was very happy with what they were seeing,” Lilbourne said. “It improved the playing surface, which improves the quality of play, which improves the safety of players.”

But the benefits didn’t stop there.

Lilbourne said staff calculated the cost of running a traditional fuel-powered lawn mower versus the electrically charged robot, and the municipality came out ahead in more than one way.

Managed through an app, the robot mower requires little supervision. The municipality can simply set a schedule for the machine, similar to robot vacuums used nowadays in homes, and it will cut the grass automatically, doing the work of two people.

Lilbourne estimated the machine will also save the municipality about 250 hours of work per season, allowing it to deploy and relocate staff to complete other tasks such as line trimming or tree pruning while improving the end result. No jobs will be cut as a result of the purchase of the $40,000 machine, half of which was paid by the soccer club, he said.

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“If we were to have staff provide the same level of service as this autonomous mower does, we would have to start cutting those sports fields, minimum three days a week,” Lilbourne said.

“Currently we cut them two days a week.”

Strathroy-Caradoc is one of the latest Echo Robotic’s clients, and the first in the wider London region, said Steven Huynh, the company’s robotics sales manager.

Though the main clientele of the company, whose products are geared towards large commercial sites, are golf courses and landscape companies, interest from municipal governments is growing, he said.

Among the company’s clients are the municipality of Waterloo and Vancouver.

“Municipalities are trying to find ways to be more efficient with their labour, and one way we can help them is by using autonomous mowers to maintain parks and sports facilities and help them maximize their labour efficiency,” Huynh said.

As for Strathroy-Caradoc, Lilbourne said there are no immediate plans to buy another robotic mower or use it elsewhere in the municipality other than the soccer pitches.

“We wouldn’t be able to pick it up and move it to another facility without having to install other infrastructure to make it work . . . so it will be specific to this facility,” he said.

jjuha@postmedia.com

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