Segway, the maker of the dorkiest way to get around while taking a city tour on vacation, wants to mow your lawn for you.
The company is out with the Navimow i series, an AI-assisted, Roomba-like lawnmower that promises to free up Saturday mornings in the suburbs with features that are missing in some other automated mowers, and at a lower price point, too.
Where some other brands’ automated mowers require perimeter wires that have to be buried underground around a property to mark off a work area, Segway’s mower uses virtual boundaries that can be edited on a smartphone.
Users can map out multiple zones on a property and schedule different mow times for each one. And the VisionFence-off Zone feature allows users to mark off things like sidewalks, stone paths, and drain covers that they want the mower to pass over without classifying them as obstacles, enabling it to get from one side of a property to another.
While much of the experience is controlled via smartphone, the Navimow is pretty smart and figures out quite a bit on its own. Its AI-powered assist mapping feature identifies lawn edges, and the company says the mower can map its work area and figure out the most efficient cutting route to “ensure an evenly cut lawn and prevent missed cuts.”
The mower’s visual detection feature allows it to avoid obstacles, something that’s more crucial for a machine that cuts grass with blades than an indoor automated vacuum cleaner. (In a promotional video, Segway previews the tech by showing the mower avoiding a teddy bear and a sleeping child on a blanket.) The mower’s 140-degree field-of-view camera uses an AI algorithm to detect more than 20 common objects.
Segway entered the automated lawnmower market in 2021 with a GPS-powered machine, but the cost of its latest model is significantly cheaper, starting at $999.
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