Robotics Lawnmower

Overview

Roadside Robotics is my garage startup to make autonomous electric commercial lawn mowers. I had been thinking of this idea since 2011 when I entered undergrad at WPI and majored in Robotics. However, it wasn’t until 2017 when I started actively working on business plans and building prototypes, after graduating MIT with my Masters.

Through market research, I confirmed that the largest problem facing landscaping businesses is a shortage of quality reliable labor. Other consistent pain-points included cost of gas to operate equipment, noise from equipment, and increasing environmental conscientiousness of their customers. All of these problems would be addressed by eclectic autonomous lawnmowers, and at the time there were none available on the market.

There were consumer robot mowers, but these were too small, slow, and underpowered to be used by professional landscaping companies. They were designed to be sold to homeowners and permanently installed on lawns, using guide wires. I envisioned a robot that would leverage the recent breakthroughs in deep learning combined with the newly affordable RTK GNSS technology to mow large lawns mostly autonomously. That is, an operator could pilot the mower around the perimeter of a lawn once, and it would “fill in” the inside while avoiding obstacles, and remember the shape of the lawn for next time. Later, I would use the dataset of lawns with precise GPS coordinates to train a deep learning model to estimate lawn shapes from satellite images, eliminating the training step.