Autonomous mowing at Franklin Parks in Tennessee
City parks and recreation department · Autonomous mowing · Trade press
An independent editorial outlet wrote its own account of this deployment. Numbers still appear exactly as published, and still need verification against your own job.
The job
The City of Franklin, Tennessee's parks department has outsourced mowing to contractor Landscape Services, Inc. since 2018, and in 2023 the contractor proposed adding autonomous mowers, which the city accepted after demonstrations and safety reviews. Three autonomous mowers now cut the Park at Harlinsdale Farm and Eastern Flank Battlefield Park while a single contractor employee continuously monitors them with a controller featuring an emergency kill switch.
The agency
two parks, the Park at Harlinsdale Farm and Eastern Flank Battlefield Park (reported-by-trade-press); acreage: not published
The equipment
Three RC Mower autonomous mowers operated by contractor Landscape Services, Inc. (reported-by-trade-press)
The published numbers
three autonomous mowers deployed (reported-by-trade-press); one employee operates the three mowers where mowing the same area manually would take three employees (reported-by-trade-press); 10-foot buffer zone with sensors and immediate stop when an obstruction is detected (reported-by-trade-press); proposal year 2023 (reported-by-trade-press); cost and savings figures: not published
Where a source did not publish a figure, this entry says so rather than guessing.
What we would check before believing it applies to you
The contract structure matters more than the machines: Franklin did not buy mowers, its landscape contractor brought them, so the city's exposure is contained inside an existing service agreement. The published benefit is labor substitution, one monitor instead of a three-person crew, in a market where hiring for hot outdoor summer work is hard. A manned crew is still required for edge work, so plan a hybrid operation rather than full automation. Safety governance here is a sensor buffer, a kill switch, and a human watching, and a park agency should require the same and confirm its insurer's position on autonomous equipment operating around the public. No cost or savings figures are published, so ask the contractor to price the service with and without autonomy before crediting any savings.
Sources
Is your job like this one?
Describe what your agency is weighing. Abe will give you an honest preliminary assessment, and if a robot or a drone is the wrong answer, he will say so.