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While there are a number of small robot lawn mowers on the market, I think they mostly mow randomly inside a fenced off area (the fence may be a buried wire with an AC carrier signal?) Designed for mowing one residential lawn, and not using any sort of optimal mowing path.

Now Honda is demoing a battery powered zero-turn mower that can be trained by a human mowing a big lawn once. Multiple mowing jobs can be stored in memory for future playback. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptN-qrEGqX0 [youtube.com] Clearly designed for landscape contractors and other commercial mowing services.

They claim various AI features, but from the looks of it, this is limited to safety--stopping if the machine senses people and/or new objects in the stored mowing path. From the YT text:

Capable of operating in manual or autonomous mode, when manually operated, the Honda AWM learns the mowing routes and patterns set by the operator. In autonomous operation, the AWM reproduces these routes and patterns, which can free up workers’ time to focus on more high-value tasks.

Prediction for the next generation of AI mower--automatically re-works the internal mowing path each mow to keep from leaving tell-tale patterns in the grass. Of course each path is optimized, so all these different patterns take about the same time to mow the given lawn.

Original Submission