Whether it’s the shades, blinds or lights, Charles Brian Quinn says he loves automating household things. His favorite examples are the lights turning on and the toilet seat rising when someone walks into the bathroom.
So, when looking to start his next company, Quinn remembered a constant complaint he’d heard from landscapers he spoke to.
“They’re like, ‘I can’t find people,’” Quinn says. “‘You should build something to just fix that,’ and I said, ‘That seems really hard.’”
Quinn went on a few ride-alongs with landscapers to talk about and see what lawn care projects were taking the longest, and he found mowing was the clear winner.
“I said, ‘What if your mower could do it for you?’” Quinn recalls. One landscaper responded, “Well, shoot — I’d buy that.”
Quinn says a light bulb went off in his head, and soon he became a co-founder of Greenzie in 2018. The company’s goal is freeing people from repetitive outdoor labor through upfitted, autonomous mowers.
Greenzie strives to make the self-driving process as simple as possible. After purchasing a mower that’s been equipped with Greenzie technology from select equipment dealers, Quinn says there are only three short steps to getting started with an autonomous mower.
“You map (by manually mowing) the outer perimeter of the job you want to do, you step away and you press mow and you let the mower mow, and there is no step three,” Quinn says. “Step three is profit — it’s go do another task. Do all the detail work while the mower does the middle part. (It) basically is an extra worker on your crew.”
Once the software maps the perimeter of the target area, the hardware moves the mower, easily making turns thanks to waypoints created from the established boundary and avoiding obstacles with the multiple sensors and cameras. Safety is a top priority for Greenzie, and Quinn says there have thankfully been no injuries between a mower and people.
“We’re starting in the green industry, which is dear to my heart and one that I think has some of the highest repetitive injury, repetitive strain injury and deaths — let’s be honest — on people on mowers when they fall over,” Quinn says. “We’re going to continue to help landscapers be more productive, more efficient and safer.”
Campus life
Safety continues to be a vital component to the mowers as Greenzie finds a new home on college campuses across the country. Despite the constant presence of students, trees, sidewalks and all sorts of obstacles in the way, Greenzie has stepped up to the task and established itself as a mainstay of campus landscaping.
Maurice A. Coley, superintendent of landscape operations at Georgia Southern University, says he’s two years into having Greenzie mowers on campus, and they’ve helped tremendously with productivity.
“Typically, it will take about two guys half a day to mow the field. There’s one guy now that can mow the fields and do everything else,” Coley says. “The technology is allowing me to repurpose those guys to do something else where we weren’t before able to do all the detailed stuff because I had to have the guys cutting.”
One worry with autonomous technology like this is that it’s a job killer, but Coley says it becomes much more exciting for crews once they get familiar with the mower. He says his decision to purchase mowers with Greenzie technology was due to labor shortages, and he needed a way to “do more with less.”
Quinn also says it’s typical for crews to joke or worry that autonomous mowing is their replacement, but they quickly realize it instead supports them in their job and saves them time.
“If my goal was to create just terrible jobs, I would give all my guys scythes or scissors and then I’d say, ‘Hey, we need 1,500 people to cut this field.’ That’s not what we’re in the business of,” Quinn says. “What I want is my best, hardest working guys getting the best tools, and that happens to be a Greenzie-equipped mower right now if they’re going to mow big acreage.”
According to Quinn, another part of what makes Greenzie-fitted mowers great tools is its powerful software and data collection. For example, Greenzie mowers receive software updates every two weeks to improve the mower’s safety, efficiency and productivity. Other features include data collection on the mowers’ speed and efficiency, customizable stripe angles and alerts if the mower runs into any issues.
“All kinds of productivity and efficiency can be gained with this new insight,” Quinn says. “You have all these mowers, and you have these people in the field. You have this data, and using it to make your crews more efficient becomes a lot easier once you can visualize it and see it.”
Coley says this data has been helpful for his teams at Georgia Southern, especially the feature that lets him save and replay certain recurring jobs.
“As the technology gets better, (the mower) could work (better) in smaller spaces, around obstacles and trees and stuff like that,” Coley says. “I know they’re working around some of those obstacles, but I see in the future that just about every landscaping company or university possibly could have an autonomous mower in their fleet. It kind of makes sense.”
Despite autonomous technology garnering recent excitement, especially with similar equipment such as self-driving cars and campus food delivery robots, Quinn says the novelty for him wears off quickly. Seeing a robot perform tedious work just makes sense.
Meanwhile, Coley has a bit more fun with his campus fleet of mowers.
“We’ve had a few calls where people think, ‘Hey, we have a runaway mower,’ so we just put an American flag on it,” Coley laughs. “We did the flag just to let people know it’s an autonomous mower, it’s not a runaway mower. I’ve seen people pull over on the side of the road looking at it. I’ve seen people that are walking around the track stop and look at it, so we have gotten some good reactions on it.”
