Like a Roomba for grass, Mow-ana maintains the lawn at Newport City Hall
The future of a well-manicured lawn is now. And the future looks like a tiny Batmobile that mows and mulches, requiring as much manual labor as it takes to tap a few buttons on a phone app.
The landscaping team for the city of Newport Beach is testing an autonomous lawnmower on its Civic Center green that is essentially a Roomba for grass.
Formally, it’s called the Husqvarna Automower 450X. At Newport City Hall, it’s affectionately referred to as Mow-ana, a play on the movie “Moana.”
The self-guided mower — all 2 by 2 feet and 30 pounds of it — knows its perimeter, established by guide wires implanted in the dirt at the edges of the lawn between City Hall and the parking garage, and it has a built-in GPS that lets it know where it has and hasn’t been.
“This is, I guess you could say, a revolutionary approach to mowing,” said Paul Sullivan of Alan’s Lawnmower & Garden Center, the shop that offered the mower to the city. It retails for about $3,500.
The Automower 450X moves at random, so it doesn’t leave neat, baseball diamond-style crosshatches, but its more frequent, smaller, hither-thither cuts are healthier for the grass than a straight, weekly chop, Sullivan said.
After about two weeks of use, city landscape manager Dan Sereno said he’s likely to permanently bring Mow-ana into the city fleet.
Powered by a lithium-ion battery, the Automower can buzz around for about five hours, covering about 1.25 acres at a whisper-quiet 59 decibels before it takes itself back to its charging port, which is nestled inconspicuously in a ficus hedge.
It can handle steep terrain, rain and pavement and has ultrasonic technology that enables it to detect something solid nearby — say, a toy, a child or a squirrel — and if it has a run-in with something that isn’t grass, it will bump it and roll away without engaging its blades.
The little lightweight mower would seem easy to snatch, but its anti-theft technology includes an alarm that shrieks if the unit is picked up. It also will send an alert to its app and shut down if it’s mower-napped, requiring a security code to be entered directly on the device to reactivate it. And if it is carried off, its GPS will tell its owner where it’s being stashed.
Husqvarna’s autonomous lawnmowers have come a long way since they were first released in 1995. The debut model was about 5 by 3 feet and solar-powered, said Nick White, a Robotics and Automower sales manager for Husqvarna.
The current incarnation has been around four or five years but has been slow to catch on, White said. People are skeptical that such a small machine can effectively mow large swaths of lawn.
Sereno said he was concerned that the mower would be a distraction or disruption for people who visit the Civic Center complex, which also includes a park and the main library. But he’s now a believer.
Sullivan, as a Husqvarna dealer, had the opportunity to test one at home, but he decided to market it in Newport, where he thought ecologically and technologically savvy people would be intrigued. He reached out to the city and found quick interest.
“This is far more exposure than I’d have gotten in my front yard,” he said.
Twitter: @Daily_PilotHD
All the latest on Orange County from Orange County.
Get our free TimesOC newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Daily Pilot.
