Honda Announces Autonomous Work Mower That Learns Your Driving Patterns
Honda has produced a number of highly reliable OPE solutions over the years, particularly in the gas sector. However, with the announcement that they were exiting the gas lawnmower market, we wanted to see what was next for the brand in terms of electric OPE. Now we have our answer— or at least a prototype!
Honda announced the Autonomous Work Mower, which will be the company’s first battery-powered zero-turn riding mower. The question is, what does it have in store, and what can we expect it to accomplish with its autonomous mowing capabilities?
Honda Autonomous Zero-Turn: The Big Deal
- Honda ZTR AWM
- Teaching and Playback modes
- Cutting deck: 60 inches
- Three 21-inch blades
- Rear discharge
- Cutting height range: 1.5 – 5.25 inches
- Max ground speed: 10 MPH (manual); 6 MPH (autonomous)
- 4 LiDAR and 4 Radar for omnidirectional sensing
The Honda Autonomous Work Mower is a prototype created by Honda to help improve the efficiency of lawn care and landscaping maintenance pros. As a fully battery-powered machine, it also produces no direct emissions while in use.
It has a cutting deck of 60 inches and features three 21-inch blades for even cutting. You can set your cutting heights between 1.5 and 5 inches, and grass clippings are evenly distributed with rear discharge.
This mower has a forward ground speed of up to 10 MPH in manual mode and 6 MPH in auto mode. The AWM automatically reduces blade rotation at low speeds and low loads to reduce power consumption, leading to longer runtimes.
Teaching and Playback Modes
This Honda zero-turn mower’s big draw, however, is its autonomous mowing capabilities. It features two modes: Teaching and Playback. Teaching mode lets you manually maneuver the ZTR AWM to create a mowing route that the machine maps and stores in a cloud server. Honda tells us you can create different mowing routes and customize them for multiple jobsites.
In Playback mode, you can download your specified mowing route map using your tablet or smartphone, and the Honda Zero Turn AWM will autonomously mow according to the map. This gives you time to maintain other areas of the job, increasing your team’s efficiency.
Finally, radar and LiDar sensors help it detect obstacles and stop accordingly, and omnidirectional sensing lets this zero-turn detect changes in terrain.
Honda Autonomous Zero-Turn Price
Since this mower is still extremely early in development and has not left the prototype phase at the time of writing, Honda has not set pricing yet. We will be sure to update this article with more information as it becomes available.
