Lawn-mowing robots are coming to your neighborhood, if they’re not already there. So far the price is a bit chunky—in the $1500 to $4000 range—so it’s mainly professional landscapers who own them. But as always with new technology, the price break is just a matter of time.
Jim Barry, media spokesman for the Consumer Technology Association, says, “There’s a couple of things that make products really popular and widespread. One, the price has to be right. The second, it has to do something that people are looking to get done. And the third, it’s got to be easy to use.”
In the same way Roomba robot vacuum cleaners have caught on, Barry expects the robot lawnmower will be next, and no telling what else. “Robots are doing our lawns, and I would say get ready for robots to be doing a lot more.”
Will the robot lawnmower cut down on the number of illegal aliens who make a living mowing lawns? “One thing that new technology often does is it creates new opportunities, but it also takes existing jobs and eliminates them,” Barry says. “Robots have already done that in a lot of commercial and industrial uses, so they may do that as well with consumer uses.”
Barry says robots in form or another are the wave of the future. “If you read your science fiction from the ’50s, ’60s, even the ’70s and later, you’ll see a lot of those things that were predicted then are already in place.” He gives personal digital assistants, such as Alexa from Amazon and Google Home, as examples.