The next billion-dollar market: LiDAR Found It

By the end of 2023, Hesai Technology, which has been making progress in autonomous driving, received a new project.

The target of this project's deployment is not the smart cars that Hesai has painstakingly tackled over the years, but a device that domestic consumers rarely encounter—a lawnmower.

The intelligent lawn mower is a new track that has just emerged in recent years.

Although the domestic market is not large, the overseas demand is considerable. Data shows that there are a total of 250 million private gardens worldwide, which has led to sales of 1.8 million smart lawn mowers last year.

Among them, the number of new intelligent lawn mowers that do not rely on boundary wires exceeded 200,000 units.

With the development of intelligent technology, the traditional lawn mower market is experiencing changes as Chinese companies enter the field, bringing solutions with multiple technological approaches.

Lidar, after being widely used in fields such as robotic vacuum cleaners and autonomous driving, is also regarded as an ideal sensor for intelligent lawn mowers.

This is yet another scenario with strict requirements for performance and cost, but Hesai decided to accept the challenge.

Liu Xingwei, Vice President of Robot Perception Business at Hesai Technology, told Yiou Auto:

On one hand, backed by technological accumulation and mass production experience in fields such as intelligent driving, Hesai is confident in being able to accomplish it.

On the other hand, after thorough market research, Hesai has also assessed that the future market for smart lawn mowers will experience a boom, making it a field worthy of long-term investment.

According to QYResearch, the global market size for LiDAR lawn mowing robots is expected to be approximately $550 million (about 3.95 billion RMB) in 2024 and is projected to reach $2.21 billion (about 15.87 billion RMB) by 2031. This indicates that LiDAR has the opportunity to once again break through the 10-billion-level market.

At CES held in January 2025, Hesai officially unveiled the JT series, a LiDAR specifically customized for lawn mowers.

In less than 5 months, over 100,000 units of the JT series have been delivered, setting the fastest delivery record for lidar in the robotics field.

The high-end smart home appliance brand MOVA, which collaborates with Hesai, has launched two lawn mowers—the MOVA 600 and MOVA 1000—both equipped with the JT series. Since their debut on Amazon in March this year, they have quickly become popular. In particular, the MOVA 1000 has taken the top spot in the smart lawn mower category in major markets such as Germany and France in just two months.

In April this year, Hesai signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Coting Technology to provide 300,000 JT series LiDAR units over the next year for use in MOVA lawn mowers.

Due to the strong demand for intelligent lawn mowers, Hesai's lidar shipments in the robotics field will exceed 200,000 to 300,000 units in 2025, surpassing the total of the past few years and showing explosive growth.

This will also help Hesai achieve its annual target of "1.2 to 1.5 million units" this year, becoming a new growth driver for Hesai's business.

 Customize a LiDAR for a lawn mower.

The intelligence of lawn mowers has also undergone a long iteration.

For a long time, the so-called intelligent lawn mowers used a "buried wire" technology, which involved embedding electromagnetic induction wires in the lawn to define the working area, while the robot moved randomly by collision.

This mode of working is inefficient and offers a poor experience, which is why it has never truly penetrated the market.

Around 2020, with the development of various positioning and obstacle avoidance technologies such as UWB (Ultra-Wideband) and RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) positioning, lawn mowers ushered in a new wave of "boundaryless" intelligence, leading a number of Chinese manufacturers to enter this field.

In 2023, MOVA also began developing smart lawn mowers.

Similar to intelligent driving, the operation of intelligent lawn mowers is also divided into four stages: perception, localization, planning, and execution. The technologies for planning and execution are relatively mature, while perception and localization remain significant challenges, as lawn mowers work on outdoor grass fields where the environment is variable and the terrain is complex.

MOVA was one of the earliest to experiment with the mainstream RTK solutions in the industry.

RTK is a technology that uses satellite differential signals for real-time position correction and performs excellently in open environments. Some established European lawn mower suppliers like Husqvarna have turned to this technology in their product iterations.

Domestic manufacturers, who are typically more competitive, tend to adopt the RTK+vision fusion approach to achieve better positioning and obstacle avoidance.

The RTK solution has considerable limitations. On one hand, its operation requires the use of a base station, whether using a standalone pole or accessing a public base station network, which incurs additional costs.

On the other hand, RTK's stability is not high and is easily affected by the environment. When encountering obstructions or different weather conditions, it can lose positioning, leading to map reconstruction and reducing the user experience.

Qin Ling, the CTO of MOVA's lawn mowing robot business, stated in an interview with Yiou Auto that the company adopts a "dual-track parallel" strategy in its technology layout, advancing the development of two mainstream technologies simultaneously. While the lawn mower industry still generally relies on RTK stake technology, the MOVA team was among the first to turn their attention to LiDAR.

Although the MOVA team had also developed a prototype based on RTK, they found that it could not perfectly solve the problems of lost positioning and drift, so they completely switched to the LiDAR solution.

Lidar, as a sensing and detection device, has been widely used in fields such as smart cars and robotic vacuum cleaners. It can achieve centimeter-level positioning through laser scanning and map matching, and is less affected by environmental factors such as lighting and obstruction. It quickly became an optional sensor for intelligent lawn mowers.

Qinling stated that compared to smart cars, smart mowers operate at a lower speed and have a higher safety margin. The current performance of LiDAR is excessive and the cost is relatively high. Therefore, they decided to jointly develop a LiDAR specifically for mowers with Hesai.

MOVA presented several criteria to Hesai, including a 360-degree FOV and multiple beams. The core requirement is to ensure the quality and accuracy of the point cloud while significantly controlling costs—this is quite a challenge.

Fortunately, this is not a project starting from scratch.

Hesai has accumulated extensive product and mass production experience in fields such as robotaxi and smart cars. The robotics team, based on the mature AT series, jointly developed a mini 3D lidar for lawnmowers with MOVA, which later became known as the JT16.

The JT16 can achieve centimeter-level precision in 3D map construction. Compared to RTK solutions, users can remotely control the lawnmower to establish map boundaries without complex installation and debugging. Additionally, it is not affected by weather, lighting, signal, and other factors, allowing it to better handle complex outdoor conditions.

One of the highlights of the JT16 compared to other types of LiDAR is its 360-degree coverage with no blind spots. It allows the mower to obtain complete environmental information in one go during mapping, requiring only a single unit without needing to change direction, and can perceive and identify the distance to surrounding obstacles.

According to Liu Xingwei, in practical applications, it takes only 3.5 minutes for the JT series to complete mapping a 1,000 square meter grassland in a three-dimensional environment.

In contrast, forward-facing pure solid-state radar is significantly limited in coverage area—its horizontal FOV is 120 degrees, and a single scan can only capture limited area information. The lawn mowing robot needs to frequently move and adjust its direction to complete the scanning and mapping of the entire lawn.

This will not only significantly increase the travel distance of the lawnmower and reduce operational efficiency, but also during frequent turns, the positioning accuracy is easily disturbed, causing deviation.

For example, on an open front lawn, when the lawnmower is facing away from the house, the forward-facing solid-state radar has limited visibility and cannot detect reference objects like the house behind it, which may result in positioning failure.

The 360-degree LiDAR has omnidirectional detection capability, allowing it to identify objects such as houses behind and maintain precise positioning.

Lidar will become the mainstream solution.

Applying LiDAR to lawn mowing robots involves addressing the unavoidable issue of cost.

The cost sensitivity of smart lawn-mowing robots, which are sold for hundreds or thousands of euros, is extremely high.

Compared to mainstream technology routes such as pure vision and RTK+vision, LiDAR is more expensive.

In recent years, with the rapid development of intelligent driving in China, LiDAR has evolved from an early precision instrument into a usable industrial component, and its cost has significantly decreased.

For instance, in the case of Hesai, its representative product, the AT128 (a long-range hybrid solid-state LiDAR with 128 lines), has seen its price drop from the initial approximately $2000 to around $400.

This provides a solid foundation for lidar to penetrate emerging markets such as lawn-mowing robots.

Qinling told EO Auto that compared to mainstream solutions like RTK, the cost of the current LiDAR solution is higher, but still within an acceptable range.

This is largely attributed to Hesai's accumulation in the field of LiDAR, particularly the integrated design and platform layout, as well as the scale effect that can be achieved by the production capacity of the MOVA lawn mower.

An important aspect is that Hesai has invested in the independent research and development of LiDAR chips for many consecutive years, having iterated through four generations of chip platforms. By continuously improving the integration of components, they have been able to enhance performance while reducing size, thus achieving large-scale mass production for front-end installations.

JT16 is no exception.

According to Liu Xingwei, it uses Hesai's fourth-generation chip architecture, breaking through the traditional discrete component design of LiDAR and enhancing the integration of the transceiver module through a high degree of vertical integration.

The JT series is developed based on the Hesai ultra-high-definition AT series platform, which has a market-validated mature transceiver architecture. While significantly enhancing the transceiver module, the core optical scanning structure has also been greatly simplified.

The AT series has shipped over one million units in total, benefiting JT16 in terms of both technical architecture and component costs.

"Many components used in the AT series can be directly used, and some underlying circuit designs are also interconnected," Liu Xingwei told Yiou Auto. He also stated that it is precisely due to these advantages that the JT series can complete research and development within a few months and quickly move to mass production.

To improve the use of LiDAR on lawn mowers, MOVA collaborated with Hesai to develop and confirm a 16-beam solution.

High beam means richer point cloud information, which can clearly identify more complex obstacles, but high beam also means high cost.

Qin Ling stated that compared to higher-definition LiDAR, the 16-line can achieve the optimal balance between point cloud density and market performance.

The JT16 uses a 360-degree mechanical rotating radar design, which gives it high-precision distance measurement and omnidirectional uniform point cloud performance. Although it is limited by wiring and cannot distinguish what an object is like automotive-grade products, its sensing function is stable and can react quickly when encountering obstacles to avoid collisions.

An industry insider also stated that in most cases, lawn mowers only need to detect the presence of objects and do not need to clearly identify the specific contours of items such as flower pots, so there is no need to overly emphasize high resolution.

In the long run, with the increasing application of LiDAR in lawn mowing robots, it is expected to become the mainstream solution in this field.

According to data from Dorshi Consulting, the global sales of smart lawn mowing robots (including "wired" types) are expected to be approximately 383,500 units in 2024 and are projected to reach 986,300 units in 2025. Currently, the penetration rate of smart lawn mowers in the European market is between 10% and 30%, while in the North American market, it is less than 6%.

The industry generally believes that this is a field with vast potential and is expected to exceed a scale of ten billion dollars in the future.

Will LiDAR become a standard feature of intelligent lawn mowers? In the future, how will the perception solutions for intelligent lawn mowers develop?

With the improvement in LiDAR performance and the reduction in costs, this sensor has become a standard feature in robotic vacuum cleaners. In the field of intelligent driving, however, different configuration strategies have evolved based on varying technological approaches, functional requirements, and product positioning.

Liu Xingwei's view is that intelligent lawn mowers will also have several different sensor configuration schemes based on application scenarios and product positioning.

For a small area of lawn measuring 2-300 square meters, primarily focusing on visual solutions;

On a medium-sized lawn of 600-2000 square meters, a LiDAR solution can offer sufficient advantages.

On a grassland of over 2000 square meters, a hybrid solution of LiDAR + RTK or LiDAR + vision can be used to achieve better coverage.

Qinling also told Yiou Auto that MOVA recently launched its first AI binocular vision technology smart lawn mower, the MOVA ViAX series. They are also developing a laser radar + vision solution, introducing AI functions to enhance recognition capabilities. "This will help with positioning on larger lawns, and the obstacle avoidance capability will also be improved."

For the vast majority of scenarios, LiDAR has become the most suitable and available solution for smart lawn mowers.

It is not difficult to imagine that as the scale of radar further expands, the smart lawn mower industry will also usher in a new round of sensor upgrades and iterations, nurturing new growth opportunities.

"This is not only an upgrade of the lawn mower but also an important milestone in the evolution of the smart home ecosystem. According to publicly available data, it is estimated that by 2029, the global scale of robots equipped with 3D LiDAR will reach 5 million units, and environmental perception capability will become a standard feature for various types of robots," Liu Xingwei stated.