John Deere debuts new autonomous mower and more

John Deere recently debuted its latest autonomous machines during a press conference at CES 2025. These machines support not only the landscaping industry, but construction and agriculture as well.

Before their official debut at CES, Lawn & Landscape and other media outlets received a firsthand look at the autonomous machines earlier this fall in Gilroy, California. This included an autonomous, battery electric commercial mower, and 460 p-tier autonomous articulated dump truck (ADT) for quarry operations, an autonomous 5ML orchard tractor for air blast spraying and an autonomous 9RX tractor for large-scale agriculture.

“These are four more significant leaps in our autonomy journey,” says Jahmy Hindman, chief technology officer at John Deere. “There’s a common thread that connects all of these and it’s labor availability. It impacts all of these industries we serve in a very similar way. It’s difficult for those in these industries to find, attract and retain the talent they need for the work that is required of them."

Hindman told attendees that 86% of commercial landscaping business owners cannot find enough labor to fill their open positions.

“Autonomy is a significant answer to that problem,” Hindman says. “Our No. 1 mission in this is to reduce the labor dependency — that’s it.”

Deere’s autonomous commercial mower leverages the same camera technology as other Deere autonomous machines, but on a reduced scale since the machine has a smaller footprint. With eight cameras total — two on the front, left, right and rear — 360-degree coverage is achieved.

“We’ve been in the turf business for 60 years — it’s a core part of Deere,” Hindman says. “The work that’s being done in this industry is incredibly labor intensive…they’re not just doing the mowing work. They’re doing the tree trimming, maintaining flowerbeds and all these other jobs. The mowing is table stakes though for them to get the business. It’s the thing they have to do in order to get the higher value work.”

With their new autonomous mower, Hindman told attendees he hopes the machine, which is nicknamed Merlin, will free up the available labor to concentrate on these higher profile tasks — ultimately allowing them to thrive in a highly competitive environment.

Tim Lewis, lead engineer with the commercial automatous mower, adds the green industry has a high turnover rate as well.

© Kim Lux

“There’s a lot of nuances it takes to do these jobs effectively, so autonomy can help with that,” he says. That’s why Lewis told the media the focus with the autonomous mower was three things — safety, quality and productivity.

Brad Powers, director of engineering with Blue River Technology (a John Deere company), says the mower uses the same autonomous technology as the autonomous tractors and ADT.

“We’re able to leverage the fact that we spent a lot of time and a lot of effort on repeatable and reliable hardware that we expect to operate for many, many years on these vehicles,” he says.

Powers notes the mower is not just autonomous, but also electric — allowing for not only sustainability and emissions benefits but also reduced noise and easier maintenance.

“You don’t have to change the oil on this vehicle the same way you would a gas engine,” he says.

Lewis and Powers say that this autonomous mower is still in early development, so there’s no official release date yet and some of the technology may change.

Currently, the technology is a retrofit option that could be placed on John Deere’s stand-on mower fleet to maintain large properties and office parks.

“There’s a lot of demand in this market for autonomy,” Powers says. “We remain entirely committed to our focus on safety and on reliability and repeatability.”

Currently, Deere’s autonomous mower model has an off-board charger that accepts more standard power outlets. According to Lewis, the battery life is dependent but averaging about four hours of continuous mowing to 10 hours in a day. The recharge time is expected to be between six to 12 hours.

The machine has integrated batteries, so there isn’t any swapping out batteries if one dies.

“It gives us a higher energy density,” Lewis adds.

John Deere has a targeted release for its electric lawn mowers by 2026, with the autonomous retrofits debuting after that.

Powers says its Deere’s approach and commitment to safety that sets their autonomous model apart from the crowd.

“Our approach is much more in-depth and rigorous,” Powers says. “This product isn’t going to be in the world until it’s ready.”

“This is part of an ecosystem of additional autonomous equipment,” Hindman adds. “The competitive commercial mowing set is not. The information that comes off of the tractors, from an autonomous perspective, makes this mower better. The data that comes off of this, in return makes those better.”

In time, Hindman says he hopes this mower can help solve additional problems such as fleet management, maintenance, documentation, invoicing and more.

“The value starts with the robot in the field doing the work — but that’s only the beginning,” Powers says. “The things you can do with this machine and it’s data, once it’s out in the world, is immense.”

More information on all of Deere’s autonomous machines can be found here.