Mower will memorise your lawn and cut it autonomously

Able to mow over 3.5 hectares per hour at speeds up to 20 kph, Cox Industries’ new commercial lawn mower the WRIGHT ZK AUTONOMOUS will be at the Henty Machinery Field Days this year.

Aiden Andrews, Cox’s State Sales Manager for Vic, SA and Tasmania, said just 72 units of this machine existed in the world with 70 units operating in the USA, one in Canada and now one in Australia. 

Built on the proven heavy duty Wright Stander machine, the autonomous control module makes programming as easy as mow the boundary once and the mower’s AI fills in the rest. 

Simply mow the lawn once manually how you’d like, and the ZK Autonomous will memorise your cutting pattern and faithfully replicate it.

Bring the machine back in a couple of weeks when the lawn needs mowing again, drive it to the boundary of the area to be mowed and simply set it to autonomous mow.

The machine’s GPS will confirm its location, and having previously memorised the lawn will set off to faithfully reproduce the desired mowing pattern.

Safety is the number 1 priority. The Wright ZK Autonomous is built to meet or exceed ISO 10218-1 2011 and ANSI/RIA R15.08-1-2020. It operates to the same safety standards applied to all Autonomous Mobile Robots, the same standards applied to large-scale industrial robots and robotic systems.

Safety is multilayered: -

the mower remembers maps of the lawns it mows and their locations,

each ZK is fitted with four depth sensing cameras and one machine learning camera to detect obstacles, which it can steer around or safely come to a full stop,

each operator carries a rock-sold wireless emergency stop device

the operator can create no go zones to avoid hard to see obstacles like drains 

“We’ve come from a lawn mowing business ourselves, so we know what it takes,” Ed Wright, CEO of Wright Manufacturing, said. 

“Making a machine that’s heavy duty enough to provide years of trouble-free service in field is a great start but today it’s also really all about productivity. The labour market is really challenging, so a machine that can turn time into money faster, do I or 2 additional jobs in a day on the same fixed costs, that has a huge impact on business profitability,” he said.

“Landscaping is a relationship business in a sea of mowers, a lot of the larger companies are just not in touch at the level of detail needed by their customers. Often their primary responsibility is to their shareholders, not their customers.”

Over 30 years manufacturing, over 50 US Patents, a 9,000 plus square metre ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing facility says Wright are clearly doing it right.

Partnered with Australia’s own 70-year-old Cox Industries, that’s 100 plus years of lawn mowing experience.