John Deere’s new robot lawnmower is coming for landscapers’ jobs | TechCrunch

John Deere has a bunch of new products that it just showed off at CES 2025, including an electric robot lawnmower meant for commercial-grade landscaping.

Powered by a 21.4kWh battery — roughly a quarter the size of what you’d find on a passenger EV — the company says the mower is supposed to be able to operate for up to 10 hours. It uses four pairs of stereo cameras, two on each side, to see in 360 degrees.

Being electric, the mower is much quieter than its gas-powered predecessors, which John Deere claims will allow for jobs to start earlier in the morning. But the company’s not hiding that it expects the mower could replace human labor. In fact, in the materials distributed to the press ahead of the show, the company cited a report from a landscape management software company that said keeping qualified labor on staff “was a major challenge.”

“Our agriculture, construction, and commercial landscaping customers all have work that must get done at certain times of the day and year, yet there is not enough available and skilled labor to do the work,” Jahmy Hindman, John Deere’s chief technology officer, said in a statement. “Autonomy can help address this challenge.”

John Deere’s other CES 2025 announcements also center around autonomy and are a lot bigger, literally.

There’s an autonomous 5ML orchard tractor that can blast spray crops. It will start as a diesel-only tractor, though John Deere says a “battery electric tractor of comparable size and capacity” will follow at some point. The company also showed off a larger 9RX tractor for tilling fields, which uses a 16-camera array.

The biggest is an autonomous articulated dump truck, which is built for quarry operations. These types of sites have been leveraging autonomy for a while now, and the new 460 P-Tier dump truck John Deere showed off at CES is the latest entry.

Each of those products will help augment the kind of important but unglamorous work that many people never think about. And those are likely to replace or augment labor just the same. But it’s the robot mower that most of us are likely to actually encounter sometime in the near future. We just don’t know when — a rep for John Deere says “exact timing isn’t being shared right now.”