My first “real” job was mowing lawns. I put the word “real” in quotation marks because it was the first time I worked as an employee for someone else’s business, but I was too young to be a legal, taxable employee.
However, I was old enough to push around a lawnmower, handle a weed-whacker, and scoop sludge out of clogged rain gutters.
It was a summer job with a family friend who was kind enough to give me a cut of his Saturday morning cash earnings.
I learned a lot at that job. I learned the value of hard work, the satisfaction of a job well done, and the terror a customer feels when a 13-year-old kid is climbing on their roof without any safety equipment.
In the not too distant future, stories like this are going to be just quaint memories of a bygone era. Technology is finally beginning to encroach on the landscaping business.
iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), maker of the famous Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner, has received FCC permission to use a low-power wireless frequency for a new type of robotic lawnmower.
While little is currently known about iRobot’s design, it is believed to be a close sibling to the Roomba vacuum, which is entering its 14th year in production.
“Electronic fencing” has long been a part of the Roomba’s functionality, where battery-powered pylons mark the limits of where the robotic vacuum can go. The FCC’s recent wireless waiver for iRobot pertained to similar pylons, but in the form of stakes driven into the user’s lawn.
These stakes, according to the FCC’s documentation, could be as much as two feet high, indicating that the iRobot lawn mower will be dramatically larger than any Roomba.
Indeed, early autonomous lawnmower designs have drawn most of their mechanics from the common electric push mower. These also give a good idea of the general expectations the consumers should have for a first-generation product.
The Landroid from Chinese tool company WORX, for example, runs on a 28V rechargeable lithium battery and offers a 7” mowing base. Kyodo America’s LawnBott 75 has a 10” mowing base and can run 1.5 hours for every two-hour charging session. Swedish outdoor power machinery company Husqvarna (OMX: HUSQ-B) makes an 8.7” wide robotic mower that runs for 45 minutes per charge of its NIMH battery.
Obviously, such machines aren’t capable of the heavy-duty work that gas-powered mowers can do. Generally, they cut grass between three-quarters of an inch and two-and-a-half inches with multiple small spinning blades. They run quietly, with no emissions and low energy demands.
Their price tags are another issue. These machines currently run between $1,000 and $3,000 and their purpose is merely to maintain upkeep of a fairly tame, fairly flat lawn.
iRobot has been hinting at a new breed of robot for the last few quarters. Rather than reacting to its environment with bumpers, infrared, and wireless sensors, iRobot says its next generation of robots will utilize cloud-based mapping and “visual simultaneous localization and mapping” (vSLAM) to actually let its robots understand their surroundings.
This second generation of robots is expected in the second half of the fiscal year.
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iRobot’s most recent quarterly earnings appeared strong, with a 6.4% growth in revenue against last year to a total of $148.8 million. Sales increased 24% over the previous year on domestic sales of its higher-end models and a 60% spike in growth in Chinese sales.
While the company did outperform its guidance, this was actually attributed to underestimating its sales. For this quarter, iRobot is expecting flat year-over-year growth with $146 million in revenue and earnings between $17 and $19 million.
However, that flat quarter is likely to be balanced out by a strong fourth quarter, in which iRobot has an “unusually heavy” volume of shipments booked.
If you plan on investing with the future lawn robot line in mind, the quarterly slump would be a good time to buy.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
