As we all know, the main battlefield for robotic lawn mowers has long been in Europe and the United States, where courtyard culture runs deep. Today, this "reserved territory" long dominated by foreign giants is gradually being cultivated by Chinese enterprises. With the global expansion of China’s smart manufacturing, "Chinese robots mowing the lawns overseas" has become a new landscape.
As a subsidiary of Nanjing Tengya Industrial Group (hereinafter "Tengya Group"), a long-established intelligent equipment enterprise, Nanjing Tengya Robotics Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter "Tengya Robotics") is riding a strong industry wave. Although backed by an experienced parent with over 20 years of overseas market experience, this young company is undergoing a self-revolution: facing intensified technological competition, reshaped business logic, and the rise of cross-border newcomers, how can it break through?
Breaking Through: Entering the Consumer Market, Topping Subcategory Rankings in the First Month
Stepping into Tengya Robotics’ office, an intense yet orderly working atmosphere fills the air. April to July each year marks the peak sales season for garden products in Europe and the United States, and the team is fully preparing to create another "spring miracle".
In April 2025, Tengya Robotics’ self-developed robotic lawn mower launched on Amazon. It became a Best Seller in its subcategory within the first month and set a delivery record of over 150,000 units shipped in 20 days during the peak season.
Behind this achievement lies a complete evolution from "factory thinking" to "user-centric thinking".
Founded in March 2020, Tengya Robotics focuses on service-oriented embodied intelligence and was incubated by Tengya Group, which boasts over 20 years of precision manufacturing experience. For a long time, Tengya Group penetrated overseas markets through OEM. In recent years, amid profound restructuring of the global trade landscape, management increasingly recognized the fragility and passivity of relying solely on OEM, and resolved to step from behind the scenes to the forefront to face global competition directly.
To break into the unfamiliar consumer market, how could the team effectively break the circle? With the momentum of "the first battle is the decisive battle", they revolutionized the product R&D logic.
Yue Qingyong, Chairman of Tengya Robotics, stated frankly that in the past OEM business, the core indicator was "durability" to ensure products stood the test of time. However, for end-user households in Europe and the United States, experience matters most: compact size to save space, easy operation with simplified steps, and convenient storage adaptable to diverse household scenarios.
To this end, the team achieved an out-of-box, user-friendly experience for its flagship robotic lawn mower through three key designs:
Removing electronic fences to eliminate complicated wiring and nailing;
Adopting visual obstacle avoidance to intelligently identify boundaries and obstacles via built-in cameras;
Extremely simplified workflow: users only need one click to power on, place it on the lawn, and the robot starts automatically.
This extreme pursuit of user experience quickly resonated in the market. The product received rave reviews, with "ease of use" and "intelligence" becoming frequent keywords in reviews. Sales and rankings confirmed the accuracy of this R&D shift.
Yet the real test had just begun: orders flooded in, and fulfillment capacity became decisive. To match peak-season demand, Tengya Robotics’ Nanjing smart factory has built a highly flexible production system: fully automated production lines run at full capacity, and the battery PACK production line operates 24 hours nonstop. This ensures stable quality for every unit and lifts production efficiency to industry-leading levels.
"Last year, we tempered the team, achieved strong performance, and gained full confidence," Yue Qingyong revealed. Focusing on high-end markets including Europe, the United States, and Australia, the company will continue its dual-wheel drive strategy of "online traction + offline penetration" during peak sales seasons. For online channels alone, this year’s sales target has multiplied several times, aiming to rapidly expand market share and continuously build product reputation.
Breaking the Deadlock: Ending "Random Wandering" and the "Stone Age" of Lawn Mowers
"When the company was founded, global sales of robotic lawn mowers were just over 600,000 units; now they are close to 3 million," Yue Qingyong said, outlining a steep growth curve.
European and American markets have massive rigid demand for garden robots represented by lawn mowers. However, despite years of use, user experience remained stuck in the "Stone Age": inaccurate positioning, failed obstacle avoidance, slipping on slopes, incomplete edge trimming… These recurring pain points in real usage urgently required systematic solutions from intelligent garden equipment.
Tengya Robotics keenly captured the window for technological iteration. As early as early 2020, the company took the industry lead in researching RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) positioning, achieving precision of 1.5 centimeters. With this, robotic lawn mowers abandoned the traditional "random wandering" mode and achieved orderly navigation.
However, the team soon found that RTK relies heavily on satellite signals. In dense forests, building dead corners, or cloudy weather, signal loss or drift often occurred, causing interruptions or missed cuts. To solve this problem, Tengya Robotics cooperated with Fudan University to introduce visual recognition technology. When satellite signals are lost, vision takes over, processing visual signals through cameras.
Yue Qingyong joked: "In this process, we have to teach robots to recognize grass all over the world."From clover in New Zealand to daisies in French countryside, over four years the team conducted tests in hundreds of complex lawn scenarios, training the vision system to fully perceive and understand complex environments, achieving detection, recognition, and semantic segmentation of static objects (lawn boundaries, trees, shrubs, paths, stones) and dynamic objects (pedestrians, animals).
These technological breakthroughs finally led to product launch: in the second half of 2024, the company’s new-generation robotic lawn mower officially entered the market.
At this point, Tengya Robotics faced another test. As the technological potential and commercial value of robotic lawn mowers gained market attention, enterprises with smart appliance backgrounds and numerous startup teams flooded in. On one hand, impacted by new players, the industry fell into price competition: "prices of high-end robotic lawn mowers dropped from thousands of US dollars to seven or eight hundred US dollars." On the other hand, unlike traditional tools with a three-year replacement cycle, new players treated robotic lawn mowers as fast-moving consumer goods: launching new models every few months with rapid functional iterations and continuous user experience optimization.
Yue Qingyong realized that clinging to traditional product development rhythms and mindsets would only lead to elimination. In 2024, Tengya Robotics redefined itself as a consumer electronics company. It not only built products from a brand-new perspective but also introduced talents with internet and FMCG thinking, completely transforming corporate genes and completing self-revolution.
Riding the Waves: Sailing into Deep Water, Securing a Ticket to the Smart Garden Era
Although Chinese robotic lawn mowers are surging in overseas markets, market penetration varies sharply: exceeding 30% in Europe but only around 3% in the United States.
Yue Qingyong explained that this is mainly because lawns in the United States are larger and terrain more complex, with uneven ground and blurred boundaries, placing higher demands on robotic lawn mowers.
Currently, Tengya Robotics is advancing multiple pre-research projects to prepare for this technological "hard battle":
Four-wheel independent drive system to improve obstacle crossing and climbing;
Edge-cutting system to solve long-standing corner trimming problems;
High-capacity battery platform breaking the traditional 100Wh limit for long endurance in super-large yards;
LiDAR-vision fusion technology to build high-precision environmental maps for smooth operation in complex, obstacle-dense terrain.
The robotic lawn mower market has long passed the wild growth stage. Tengya Robotics’ core competitiveness lies not only in self-research and self-production of three core components (motor, battery PACK, electronic control) ensuring autonomy in performance and iteration, but also in Tengya Group’s strong manufacturing capability, building a moat in cost and supply chain security.
Starting from robotic lawn mowers, the company has expanded into broader home and garden scenarios, with pool-cleaning robots and other home service robots added to its product matrix. At this stage, the company’s own factory has 8 production lines dedicated to robot new products, with a monthly capacity of 70,000 units.
"Our goal is clear: to rank among the top five in the robotic lawn mower market and top three in pool robots — that is the industry survival threshold," Yue Qingyong said.
A relevant person in charge from Investment Department 4 of Nanjing Innovation Investment Group stated: Since 2024, the lawn mower and related home garden robot industry has developed rapidly, with explosive market growth and intensified competition, which heavily tests the comprehensive capabilities of leading enterprises in continuous R&D, product iteration, and supply chain management.
Tengya Robotics laid out this track two to three years in advance, introduced algorithm experts, developed self-researched high-precision positioning and vision algorithms with multi-sensor fusion, and built an overseas marketing team, achieving outstanding online sales in the US and Europe. In production, it built its own factory to control costs, and its core product team has cooperated for more than 20 years. It is expected to maintain product and cost-performance advantages in both lawn and pool robot lines.
As a local Nanjing enterprise, Tengya Group carries Nanjing’s inherent genes of integrity, pragmatism, innovation, and striving. It is hoped that the company’s down-to-earth style will help Tengya Robotics go further and become a leader in the application of embodied intelligence in Nanjing.
The lawns are fertile. Only those who ride the waves and voyage far can secure a ticket to the future of smart gardens.
Source: Nanjing Innovation Investment Group
Reviewed by: Xue Yao
Released by: You Yi
