Unmanned electric lawn mowers tested at 3 Naperville parks as district checks out new robotic tech – Chicago Tribune

The clamor of White Eagle Elementary School students at recess this week drowned out the sounds of the two unmanned electric mowers methodically rolling back and forth across the adjacent Monarch Park in Naperville.

A third electric mower with a rider buzzed around trees and the edges of the park.

Naperville Park District is experimenting with the latest in robotic mowing technology. Naperville-based Havenshine Technologies Inc. provided the autonomous electric mowers and district staff is supervising how it works this week at Monarch Park, Kingshill Park and White Eagle Park in the White Eagle neighborhood.

Signs posted Wednesday at several spots around Monarch Park warned that autonomous mowers were operating.

Within a couple of hours, the grass was cut with little to no impact on the environment from noise or carbon pollution, said Ilya Sagalovich, founder and CEO of Havenshine Technologies, a company that wants to change the traditional landscaping model with its robotic technology.

Havenshine Technologies adds an autonomous element to commercial-grade electric lawn mowers, thus providing a safe, clean and cost-saving alternative to organizations that maintain large open fields, Sagalovich said.

Michael Bigda, Havenshine’s vice president of business development, said landscaping companies, municipalities, park districts, colleges and other organizations are struggling these days to find enough laborers to do the work.

“Mowing is dirty, dull and dangerous,” Bigda said.

Havenshine isn’t taking away jobs, he said, but is making existing staff more efficient while saving money.

With the help of Havenshine, Naperville Park District is exploring how autonomous mowers might fit into the maintenance of the 2,400 acres the district oversees and help fill in gaps due to the current labor shortage.

Director of Parks Tim Quigley said a typical mowing session requires three to four workers at a site.

The work at Monarch Park showed the park district could potentially use just one person to perform the same job, he said.

Autonomous units could focus on the open fields while a district staffer mows the difficult areas around trees and other park features, performs string trimming or picks up litter before the mowers start.

“You can have considerable labor savings, and we’re maximizing our staff,” Quigley said.

John Teper, park operations manager for the south parks, said robot mowers won’t take away jobs because there is always work elsewhere that’s not getting done.

“We can utilize (employees) in other functions that’s looking at maximizing staff and increasing service standards,” Teper said.

The three parks in the White Eagle neighborhood were chosen because of their proximity and the differences in each park, Quigley said.

Monarch Park, which formerly was used as a soccer field, is the easiest of three, Sagalovich said, because the property is mostly an open field with trees situated on the periphery.

It took about five minutes to map out the area where the autonomous mowers would cut the grass, he said.

Once mapped, the computer saves the information for future use.

Kingshill Park was slightly more difficult to configure because it has a playground and some trees located in the lawn. Sagalovich said mapping took about 10 minutes.

The most challenging of the three was White Eagle Park, which has a playground, picnic shelter, basketball court and numerous trees and landscaped areas. Sagalovich said his company is working to fully configure each of the different park features into the map.

From the field testing he’s seen so far, Quigley said, it might make more sense to have a human mow around the spots where there are trees, flower beds and equipment and have the robot mower handle the larger open spaces.

It might also make sense to use the autonomous mowers on busy park properties when they are less active, perhaps early in the morning, to avoid having the mower stop every time someone overthrows a ball into the mowing area, he said.

The mowers have sensors that turn off the machine if a person, animal or piece of litter comes too close or someone climbs onto the machine.

Going electric is also a plus because it aligns with the district’s efforts to promote a healthy environment, he said.

Because of advances in battery life, the district has begun transitioning some of its mowers, trimmers and other lawn equipment over to electric, which produces no greenhouse gas emissions and no potential for gasoline or oil leaks.

subaker@tribpub.com