Challenge #1: In commercial landscaping, good workers are hard to find.
If you are familiar with commercial landscaping, you know that finding and keeping good employees is frequently cited as an ongoing challenge for the industry. Lawn care projects can be physically demanding and are seasonal in nature. In low unemployment economic conditions, finding good workers in a competitive market becomes even more difficult. Labor shortages impact the ability to grow any business, and commercial mowing is no exception. Finding innovative ways to overcome labor challenges has opened the door for autonomous robot mowing solutions.
Challenge #2: The autonomous solution needs to be reliable, secure, and accurate.
Regardless of who mows the lawn, be it a human or a robot, customers still expect a high-quality job. They want an aesthetically pleasing back-and-forth striped mowing pattern. To accomplish this, the cut pattern needs to be precise. Precise cuts are also the most time efficient. Workers need to be reliable and show up for the job, on time, every time. For an autonomous robot mowing solution to meet these criteria, it must include a robust RTK-PPP GNSS correction service.
The solution: Greenzie determined that the most effective way to grow its mowing business was by combining ruggedized sensors and robust autonomous guidance software, unlocking the mass market for high precision GNSS applications.
As a software company that combines a love for autonomous things with enthusiasm for landscaping, Greenzie has integrated its software and off-the-shelf sensors into a solution that adds self-driving capabilities to commercial mowers.
Greenzie provides their partners, leading outdoor power equipment manufacturers, with a complete solution that includes the robotic software stack and necessary hardware to enable safe autonomous mowing operation for their customers, who are typically landscaping companies. The kit, which leverages u-blox F9P high precision GNSS modules and PointPerfect, the u-blox GNSS augmentation service, upgrades existing zero-turn commercial mowers into self-driving machines.
By partnering with u-blox, Greenzie is bringing the landscaping industry to the mass market age of high precision positioning autonomous machines.
“It needs to work, with quality, and be easy. We need highly accurate localization that is always available, securely accessible, and simple to provision. We can’t just tell our customers, ‘Oh no, the GNSS correction service is down today, sorry, your mower can’t mow your customer’s lawns!’. That’s a conversation we don’t need to have because we’ve got u-blox PointPerfect under the hood. It’s rock solid.”
- Charles Brian Quinn, Co-Founder and CEO at Greenzie |
Solution benefits:
- Centimeter-level accuracy and convergence within seconds
- 99.9% uptime availability via both internet and L-band satellite communication
- Secure API provisioning via the easy-to-use Thingstream IoT service delivery platform
- Simple, predictable pricing plans with options to suit the needs of your growing fleet
Image credit: Luke Beard
Outcome #1: Commercial landscapers can rely on robotic workers to reduce labor shortages and grow their businesses.
Autonomous mowing eases the strain of labor shortages in landscaping. A three-person crew can become a two-person crew. This frees humans from monotonous back-and-forth mowing to simultaneously complete other more complex gardening tasks. Landscapers save money and grow their market share beyond traditional labor constraints.
“The platform provides real-time location data that becomes actionable in new ways, providing the next level of asset utilization and labor efficiencies that we never thought possible. It’s a real game changer for the landscaping industry.”
- Charles Brian Quinn, Co-Founder and CEO at Greenzie |
Outcome #2: OEMs can transform their existing fleets into self-driving mowers with innovative high precision autonomous machine solutions.
Commercial mower original equipment manufacturers have come to recognize the power of Greenzie’s Robotic Ready™ autonomy upgrade: Existing fleets of zero-turn mowers can be transformed into autonomous mowers while retaining the traditional attributes OEM customers expect: cut quality, deck fabrication, and drivability.
