Honda has begun testing its Miimo autonomous lawnmower with the Tokyo Metropolitan Park Association as a solution to public park grass maintenance.
Working together with Honda’s E500 portable power source, Miimo can work unsupervised for long periods. All being well, it could help with future environmental improvement operations where a mains power supply isn’t available.
If you’re wondering what Miimo is, it’s probably best described as a Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner for your lawn. In Honda terms, it’s Mean Mower meets ASIMO. And it makes sense that the creator of the world’s fastest lawnmower, and one of the world’s cleverest robots, would combine the two.
Miimo has been on the market since 2017, and has proved very popular. Honda is now putting it to work on an industrial scale.
It can cut your grass, then find its way back to a charging hub when it gets low on power. It even has different cutting presets, so you can choose how it goes about its work.
There are advantages of Miimo beyond the obvious reduction in effort on the lawn owner’s part. The more regular mowing that Miimo can realistically achieve means grass becomes healthier and denser.
It’s one thing to cut your grass while looking on from the comfort of your conservatory. It’s quite another for a mower to be out in the world unsupervised for days and potentially weeks at a time.
If this testing and future tests are successful, Miimo could find itself playing a much bigger role in the upkeep of our surroundings.