After 15 years of mostly reliable service, our petrol-powered lawn mower finally decided to resign from work this year.
Its replacement is an autonomous mower. I have been looking at them for a while and have mostly been sceptical about their capabilities, but with a dealer next door selling several hundred each year, and with prices falling while functionality increases, we decided to buy one.
It operates using a full RTK network, AI-assisted camera guidance and a LiDAR sensor, which it uses to navigate and learn its environment. It has been mostly successful, despite some software-connectivity pantomimes and a couple of accidents involving a fence and the children's slide. Generally, though, it has been very effective. It cuts the lawn in stripes and avoids the children, dogs, trees and most of the flowers.
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And it all costs just under £1,800 including VAT.
A quick online configuration with a major tractor manufacturer to add RTK, automatic steering and a control screen to a 180hp tractor came to just under £16,500, and that was before I added a tractor or even a mower for the back. Plus, I would still have to add diesel and drive it.
I appreciate that the two are very different products and are not a like-for-like comparison in any way. But in pure technology terms, how can a domestic autonomous lawn mower be retailed with broadly the same guidance technology that agriculture is charged the best part of £20,000 for?
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Yes, agricultural systems are more complex and require a far wider range of safety control systems. But as committed and early adopters of GPS guidance technology, are farmers paying significantly more for a service to maintain its value?
As autonomous technology becomes increasingly commonplace in domestic products, from robot mowers to self-driving vacuum cleaners and AI-assisted vehicles, the agricultural industry may need to ask some uncomfortable questions about the pricing of precision farming technology.
