Introduction
A landscaper’s worst headache used to be maintaining steep, muddy slopes and managing invasive brush. Today, it’s the severe nationwide workforce shortage that leaves them struggling to find labor for the most dangerous, physically demanding, and low-margin manual tasks.
RC Mowers makes commercial robotic mowers for jobs that are too dangerous or too big for traditional crews. REAPER™ is a remote-controlled tracked slope mower for steep slopes, embankments, ditches, retention ponds, and highway slopes. RECONX™ is a commercial autonomous robot mower for commercial properties, airports, municipal parks, solar sites, and highway rights-of-way, with one operator running up to three machines. Both are designed and built in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Municipalities and commercial contractors turn to RC Mowers to mitigate labor volatility and reallocate skilled crews to higher-margin projects.
Building new market solutions
RC Mowers started with REAPER, American-built remote-controlled tracked slope mowers made to take a beating on the toughest ground. REAPER mows slopes up to 50 degrees while the operator stands safely up to 1,000 feet away. One customer cut string-trimming labor on a difficult site from 40 hours to two, a 95% reduction. Years of commercial operation and customer feedback from those machines drove the development of RECONX™, the company's next-generation autonomous mower. From there, the company built a vertically integrated engineering organization with capabilities spanning mechanical design, custom electronics, controls, software, firmware, autonomy, system integration, testing, and validation.
What we have built goes far beyond any single mower... Our team, technology base, and IP portfolio form a self-contained engine built for rapid innovation.
Michael Brandt, CEO and Co-Founder
Today, Brandt leverages those capabilities to focus squarely on solving real-world operational problems rather than developing tech for tech’s sake—a philosophy that dictates how the company measures its own impact.
“We’re constantly thinking about customer success rather than selling one more product,” explained Brandt. “Our customers don’t buy technology. They buy safer work environments and greater productivity.”
Since those early days, the historic labor shortage has become one of its customers’ biggest threats. Landscaping contractors and municipal public works departments struggle to attract and retain employees for mundane, physically taxing manual labor. This shortage leaves them scrambling to cover existing workloads with fewer resources. At the same time, businesses have thin margins and feel pressure to take on more jobs without adding headcount.
Autonomous mowers enable businesses to work around the labor shortage, and reliable connectivity makes it possible. "These aren’t backyard robots," says Brandt. “They’re large commercial machines built to do real work, in real environments, day after day.”
Autonomous mowers make constant real-time adjustments based on sensor readings, operator instructions, and location data. Machine control and safety happen onboard the mower. Connectivity delivers precise positioning and lets RC Mowers monitor, diagnose, and support machines in the field. In many areas, the local network isn't stable, which can cut off that support across an entire region.
“Connectivity is fundamental,” Brandt emphasized. “Connectivity is a big part of making this work in the real world. We can build a very capable autonomous mower, but if we can’t reliably communicate with it, monitor it and support it in the field, we lose a lot of the value.”
However, deploying independent infrastructure to resolve connectivity issues is prohibitively expensive. This poses yet another hurdle to widespread industry adoption. Nevertheless, Brandt saw the potential of autonomy.
With Verizon, we have the network coverage and centimeter-level accuracy to give our customers total confidence that automation can solve their labor crises today while positioning their businesses for the next 15 years.
Michael Brandt, CEO and Co-Founder, RC Mowers
The partner to make autonomy a reality
The road to autonomous mowers was a long one, as RC Mowers tested vendor after vendor for network connectivity. Stability and reliability were perennial issues. Connectivity would go down for an entire state, and its network provider couldn’t provide an explanation. The vendor relationship just wasn’t there.
That all changed when Brandt chose Verizon Business. Verizon gave Brandt’s team diagnostic oversight of its global network, plus direct access to customer service and technical support. With that, RC Mowers could resolve issues in minutes, not days.
“We chose Verizon because coverage, connectivity, scale, and reliability are critical to making this product work,” Brandt said.
RC Mowers developed the autonomous mowing platform and core technology from the ground up. Verizon provides the critical connectivity, IoT management platform, and precision positioning that takes that technology beyond a single machine to reliably deploy, monitor, and support fleets operating across the country and around the world.
It starts with exclusive embedded connectivity. Verizon cellular connectivity is embedded into every mowing robot, giving RC Mowers the communications backbone needed to monitor, support, and manage machines in the field.
Kari Drummond, Global Solutions Executive on Verizon’s IoT Connected Vehicle Team, was a lead consultant on the project. “Connectivity is just the foundation,” she noted. “We provide our customers an entire ecosystem around autonomy and robotics, which operates differently on our network.”
One piece of that ecosystem is Verizon’s extensive real-time kinematics (RTK) service, which corrects GPS mapping with hyper-precise location1 accuracy of one to two centimeters.
“High-precision positioning is absolutely critical to autonomy,” said Matt Burton, RC Mowers Autonomy Engineering Manager. “Every time a mower goes to the same site, we need it to mow the same plan, not go outside the boundary, and not run into landscaping. Verizon gives us that reliable connectivity and precision.”
Data Analytics Manager Adela Kadiasi spends her day on Verizon’s IoT management platform, ThingSpace, which enables diagnostic fleet oversight and one-step activation and management. Where Kadiasi once had to toggle between tools, “everything is centralized on one platform now,” she said.
The final piece of the puzzle: cross-border service integration. Working off of Verizon’s unified software ecosystem gave RC Mowers the springboard to go global.
“One partner, one plan allows us to service all of our customers the same as if they were in our backyard,” Brandt said.
High-precision positioning is absolutely critical to autonomy.
Matt Burton, Autonomy Engineering Manager, RC Mowers
Everything is centralized on one platform now.
Adela Kadiasi, Data Analytics Manager, RC Mowers
Skyrocketing demand for autonomous solutions
With mowing robots, RC Mowers built an entirely new solution to industry challenges. By working with Verizon, the company has the technical foundation and support to continuously improve, upgrade existing models, and scale globally. It has sold autonomous units across the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with more international orders on the way.
“Demand for these mowers is skyrocketing,” Brandt said, and demand continues to build as more landscaping crews experience real, on-the-ground results. Using Verizon connectivity, RC Mowers customers have realized numerous benefits, including:
- Increased customer productivity: Autonomous mowers take over large, repetitive acreage, so crews can get more done without adding people.
- 90% faster resolution on average: Verizon support allows RC Mowers to improve productivity by resolving issues in minutes, not days.
- Workforce evolution and optimization: One operator can supervise up to three autonomous mowers at the same time - a 3x productivity improvement.
- Increased bidding power and profitability: Improved efficiency allows RC Mowers’ customers to take on more projects without increasing headcount or resorting to overtime and late-night shifts that increase the risk of crew burnout.
- Low-cost, low-risk entry to automation: Verizon’s RTK service provides RC Mowers with turnkey, nationwide centimeter accuracy—reducing the high cost, setup hassle, and limited range associated with managing physical base stations.
By introducing advanced robotics to the field, RC Mowers has transformed a manual job into a tech-forward career that attracts a younger, digitally native generation of talent. Leadership can repurpose skilled labor for creative, problem-solving work that turns landscaping into a rewarding career.
"Customers aren't buying a mower. They're building a Robotic Crew," said Brandt. "One person runs up to three machines from a single app and remote. Their mowing capacity grows without their labor cost growing right along with it."
“We are going beyond proving that autonomy can be done—we are proving that it can scale,” Brandt shared. “We are solving real problems and making businesses better because we have a network that can support us with the connectivity we need as we scale from hundreds to thousands and potentially tens of thousands of mowers.”
What’s next: Scaling the future of autonomous mowing
Building on years of real-world commercial deployments, RC Mowers introduced RECONX, its next-generation commercial autonomous mower. Engineered from the ground up specifically for autonomy rather than retrofitting existing equipment, RECONX is built to handle heavy-duty applications across commercial properties, airports, solar sites, and municipal rights-of-way.
Designed to make fleet automation practical and accessible for contractors of all sizes, RECONX allows operators to scale their capacity without inflating labor overhead. Verizon continues to provide the critical connectivity and high-precision positioning required to deploy, monitor, and support RC Mowers’ expanding fleet across the country.
Autonomy is really a workforce multiplier. One employee can supervise three machines at the same time, even while doing other work, allowing a contractor to increase mowing capacity without increasing headcount.
Michael Brandt, CEO and Co-Founder, RC Mowers
1 Verizon Hyper Precise Location availability is limited to the contiguous United States. Please see coverage map.
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