Whether it’s shutters, blinds or lamps – Charles Brian Quinn loves to automate things in the home. His favorite examples are turning on the lights or raising the toilet seat when someone enters the bathroom.
As Quinn considered starting his next business, he remembered a complaint he heard over and over again from the landscapers he spoke with.
“They said, ‘I can’t find people,'” Quinn says. “‘You should build something to fix this,’ and I said, ‘That seems really difficult.'”
Quinn shadowed landscapers a few times to talk about and find out which lawn care projects took the longest, and found that mowing was the clear winner.
“I said, ‘What if your lawnmower could do that for you?'” Quinn recalls. A landscaper replied, “Well, I’d buy that.”
Quinn says a light went on in his head and he soon became a co-founder of Greenzie in 2018. The company’s goal is to free people from monotonous outdoor work by using converted, autonomous lawn mowers.
Greenzie strives to make the autonomous driving process as simple as possible. After purchasing a lawn mower equipped with Greenzie technology from select equipment retailers, Quinn says it only takes three short steps to get started with an autonomous lawn mower.
“You mark out (by hand mowing) the outer perimeter of the job you want to do, step away, press mow and let the mower mow. There’s no third step,” Quinn says. “Step three is winning — you’re doing another job. Do all the detail work while the mower does the middle part. (It’s) basically an extra worker on your crew.”
Once the software maps the perimeter of the target area, the hardware moves the mower. Thanks to the waypoints created from the set boundary, it can easily turn and avoid obstacles using the numerous sensors and cameras. Safety is Greenzie’s top priority, and Quinn says that fortunately there have been no injuries between the mower and people.
“We’re starting in the green industry, which is very close to my heart and where I think most of the repetitive strain injuries and fatalities – let’s face it – occur with people falling around with lawn mowers,” Quinn says. “We’re going to continue to help landscapers be more productive, more efficient and safer.”
Campus life
Safety continues to be an important aspect of the lawn mowers as Greenzie finds a new home on college campuses across the country. Despite the constant presence of students, trees, sidewalks and obstacles of all kinds, Greenzie has risen to the challenge and established itself as a mainstay of campus landscaping.
Maurice A. Coley, director of landscape maintenance at Georgia Southern University, says he has had Greenzie mowers on campus for two years and they have increased productivity tremendously.
“Usually it takes two people half a day to mow the field. Now there’s one guy who can mow the fields and do everything else,” Coley says. “Thanks to technology, I can use those guys for other tasks. Before, we couldn’t do all the detail work ourselves because I needed the guys to mow.”
One concern with autonomous technology like this is that it will kill jobs, but Coley says it will be much more exciting for the teams once they get comfortable with the mower. He says his decision to buy mowers with Greenzie technology was due to a labor shortage and he needed a way to “do more with less.”
Quinn also says that teams often joke or fear that autonomous mowing will replace them, but quickly realize that it actually helps them do their jobs and saves them time.
“If my goal was just to create terrible jobs, I’d give all my people scythes or shears and then say, ‘Hey, we need 1,500 people to mow this field.’ That’s not our business,” Quinn says. “What I want is for my best, hardest-working people to get the best tools, and right now that happens to be a Greenzie-equipped lawn mower if they want to mow large areas.”
Another aspect that makes Greenzie-equipped mowers great tools, Quinn says, is the powerful software and data collection. For example, Greenzie mowers receive software updates every two weeks to improve mower safety, efficiency and productivity. Other features include data collection on mower speed and efficiency, adjustable strip angles and alerts when the mower is experiencing problems.
“With these new insights, productivity and efficiency can be increased in every way,” says Quinn. “You have all these mowers and you have these people in the field. You have this data, and if you can visualize it and see it, it becomes a lot easier to use it to make your teams more efficient.”
Coley says this data has been helpful to his teams at Georgia Southern, especially the feature that allows him to save and replay certain recurring jobs.
“As the technology gets better, (the mower) could (work better) in smaller areas, around obstacles and trees and things like that,” Coley says. “I know they’re working around some of those obstacles, but I see in the future that virtually any landscaping company or university could potentially have an autonomous mower in their fleet. That kind of makes sense.”
Although autonomous technologies have generated excitement recently, particularly with similar devices like self-driving cars and food delivery robots on campuses, Quinn says the thrill of novelty wears off quickly for him. Watching a robot do tedious work just makes sense.
In the meantime, Coley is having a little more fun with his fleet of lawnmowers on campus.
“We’ve gotten a few calls where people were like, ‘Hey, we have a runaway lawn mower,’ so we just put an American flag on it,” laughs Coley. “We put the flag on so people know it’s an autonomous lawn mower, not a runaway lawn mower. I’ve seen people stop on the side of the road and look at it. I’ve seen people walk around the track and stop and look at it. So we’ve gotten some good responses to it.”
