John Deere has a bunch of new products that it just showed off CES 2025With an electric robot lawnmower for commercial-grade landscaping.
Powered by a 21.4kWh battery – about a quarter the size of what you'd find in 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 jobs to start in the morning. But the company does not hide that they hope that the mower can replace human labor. In fact, in materials distributed to the press ahead of the event, the company cited a Report from a landscape management software company that said keeping qualified labor on staff “was a big challenge.”
“Our agricultural, construction, and commercial landscaping customers all have jobs that must be done
At certain times of the day and year, there still isn't enough available and skilled labor to do the job,” Jahmi Hindman, John Deere's chief technology officer, said in a statement. “Autonomy can help solve this
challenge.”
John Deere's other CES 2025 announcements also focus on autonomy and are literally a lot bigger.
There is an autonomous 5ML garden tractor that can spray crop blasts. 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 tillage, which uses a 16-camera array.
The largest is an autonomous articulated dump truck, built for quarry operations. Sites like this have been using Autonomy for a while now, and John Deere's latest entry at CES shows off the new 460 P-Tier dump truck.
Each of these products will help boost important but mundane tasks that many people never think about. And these can replace or augment labor. But it's the robotic lawnmower that most of us may actually encounter in the near future. We don't know exactly when — a John Deere representative said “an exact time is not being shared right now.”