A Florida Landscaping Contractor Moves Open Turf to Robotic Mowers

Open turf eats crew hours that belong to detail work

Commercial grounds work in Florida runs on a steady cycle that rarely lets a crew catch its breath. Client properties need open turf cut on schedule, and the same crews are expected to finish edges, trim beds and tidy the details clients notice first.

Open turf is the most repetitive part of that workload. It is large, flat and predictable, which makes it the easiest task to hand off and also the one that quietly absorbs the most hours. Every hour spent pushing a mower across a lawn is an hour not spent on the work that sets a finished property apart.

The contractor wanted to protect that detail work. The open question was whether a robot could take over the open turf reliably enough to change how crews spent their days.

Assigning the open turf to autonomous mowers

The contractor kept the decision narrow. Open turf on client grounds went to robotic mowers, while the crews kept everything that still called for judgment on the ground: trimming, edging and detail work around beds, structures and the finishing touches clients see.

Because the mowers ran autonomously, the open turf could be cut with far less direct crew attention. Crew hours could then move toward the tasks that still needed a person's eye and hands, and the clearest measure of that shift is the acreage the mowers covered.

• Assign open client turf to autonomous mowing
• Keep trimming, edging and detail work with the crews
• Move the hours freed from mowing into finishing work on each property

1,164 acres of open turf mowed autonomously

The headline result is 1,164 acres of open turf mowed autonomously. The total is vendor reported and was recognized in a third annual awards edition published January 30, 2026.

Read that figure as the mowers' output on client grounds. It shows how much open turf the robots covered, and it is the core outcome this study is built around.

The gains that followed the work split were visible in the crews' day. More of their time went to trimming, edging and detail work, the tasks where a finished property is judged most closely by the people paying for it.

What a lease means for a grounds contractor

A deployment like this one turns on three decisions: which turf to hand to a robot, what the mowers need from the site, and how the crew's day changes around them. Service Robot Co. works through those decisions as an OEM neutral robot integrator. We select robots across manufacturers, then deploy, integrate, train and service them through a nationwide US engineer network.

We lease robots only. Commercial robot leasing starts with a site assessment, and the lease is quoted once that assessment is complete on a three year term. A contractor can start with one leased unit and widen the fleet once the open turf routine is proven on its grounds.

Spare unit coverage and on site dispatch keep a mowing schedule from stalling when a unit needs attention. One partner and one number cover the whole lifecycle, from the first site visit to go live support.