Segway has expanded its robot lawnmower range with four new X3 Series models, designed especially for massive lawns. The new Segway lawnbots are designed to tackle garden from 1,500 square meters right up to a massive 10,000 square meters in size – that's the equivalent of a football pitch and a half – with (of course) no need for boundary wires. I saw some in action, tackling challenging terrain around on a golf course, and was duly impressed.
Navimow already has an i Series (for small lawns) and H Series (for small to medium lawns), but the brand found that a not-insubstantial 10% of its customers were tasking their bots with mowing a space larger than recommended. So the X3 series is designed to fill that gap, a particular focus on mowing efficiency and navigation accuracy. There are four bots in the range, priced from $2,499 / £2,199 to $4,999 / £4,299.
Segway says the X3 series models mow twice as fast as the average lawnbot. While not quite F1 speeds (which, to be clear, is a good thing – that would be terrifying), they're still impressively efficient, capable of covering an area of 5,000 square meters in 24 hours. That opens them up to commercial spaces as well as just homes with large, complex grounds.
There's a souped-up motor that offers 25% more power, plus a six-blade cutting mechanism for double the cutting power. There's also a blade specifically to prevent the mechanism getting clogged up with mulched grass. The bots can handle inclines of up to 27 degrees, as demonstrated in the clip below (it did also go up this slope).
Also helping streamline the process is an improved battery. After all, if you have a lawn that big, even the process of trundling back to the dock is going to take a while. Segway says the X3 Series bots can mow 1,200 square meters of lawn before needing to return to their dock to recharge, and when they do, that charging is super-speedy, to allow them to get back mowing asap.
If it means anything to you, the X3 Series is the first robotic lawn mower to receive an endorsement for "high mowing efficiency" from TÜV Rheinland.
Navigation stations
To ensure the lawnbots always know where they are on these gargantuan lawns, Segway has also improved its navigation features.
Lawnbots establish their location using satellite, and for the X3 Series the brand promises 20-30% better signal coverage, even in potential blind spots like narrow walkways or beneath high rooftops. There's also an extra backup antenna, for added signal stability when the base station is a long way from the edge of the lawn.
On the ground, there are two wayfinding systems working in tandem: VSLAM, which relies on recognizable visual cues, and VIO, which is better for new, featureless areas. Three cameras give the bots a 300-degree field of view – so not only can they spot obstacles in front of them, but also to either side – working alongside a Time of Flight (ToF) sensor with a 0.1-2 meter range for obstacle avoidance.
During the demo, obstacle avoidance was indeed very impressive; the lawnbot even detected and avoided moving objects like a football. (Here's more on how robot lawn mowers work, in simpler terms, if it's helpful.)
Segway has added a dot matrix screen that shows status and GPS tracking updates, and also added Alexa and Google Home compatibility, if voice commands are your thing.
An edge case?
If you want to hack the system further, and have the skills to do so, now you can. An Expansion Bay with open API enables customers to add extensions based on their needs.
The first add-on to launch through Expansion Bay is a semi-automatic edge trimmer. Before you get too excited, it's not available everywhere – there's no launch planned in the US or the UK, although it is available in some European countries including Italy, Finland, Sweden and Czechia, and there are plans for it to come to Germany and France too.
Edge trimming is something that regular lawnbots can't really do (just as today's best robot vacuums still aren't so good at edges... although at least there are features in place with those to try and improve the situation). A lawnbot that could also trim your edges could be a real game changer – it means you wouldn't need to also get out a manual strimmer to keep your lawn neat.
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