From the beginning, I was skeptical about robotic lawn mowers. I imagined a robot mowing my flower beds and wondered why someone didn't just pluck the robot off the lawn and keep walking. Heck, I don’t even think you should be growing lawns , so me recommending a lawnmower is a leap. However, there's no denying that robotic lawn mowers are here to stay, so I enlisted the lawns of every neighbor on my block and began testing a fleet of robotic lawn mowers.
This process won me over for a few reasons, and I would now recommend a robotic lawn mower to most anyone with a lawn, if you find one that works for your space. Robotic lawn mowers virtually eliminate the noise of mowing, completely eliminating the drudgery of mowing, and can keep your lawn looking consistent year-round. For medium to large lawns, I recommend the Mammotion Luba 2 . It cuts accurately and consistently, rarely affected by irregularities such as slopes, hills, holes or obstacles. Starting at $2,099, the price is out of reach for many, but if you pay for lawn service regularly, and/or have neighbors with whom you can share the robot, it might be worth it.
Mammotion LUBA 2 AWD 5000 Robot Lawn Mower
Robot lawn mowers are more than just outdoor robot vacuums
It's easy to compare robot lawn mowers to robot vacuum cleaners, but while robot lawn mowers do benefit from everything we've learned from robot vacuum cleaners over the past decade, that's probably an unfair association. I recently spoke with the engineering staff at Husqvarna, the originator of the field, and they helped me understand the additional challenges that robotic lawn mowers face in outdoor environments. In your home, LiDAR may be all you need to navigate, but outside, robots need GPS. If you want the robot to be able to mow up to, but not into, the flower bed, then you're talking about accuracy in inches. The same goes for borders, where your lawn may intersect with your neighbor's lawn. As a result, most lawn robots once relied on buried wires to define the space in which they worked. Only in recent years have these robots gone wireless, relying on GPS to keep them traveling in a straight line (sometimes).
Ruba 2 assembly and installation
Luba 2 requires a lot of assembly: the robot itself requires a few parts, like the bumpers that are attached and screwed on, and then the GPS tower and base, both of which require some assembly. It took an hour to unbox and assemble all the components, find a suitable place to live on the base, and install everything on site. There are other components to consider, such as the garage ($149 pre-order), which is just a cover for the robot since it would otherwise be exposed to the elements, and a wall mount for the GPS unit ($79 pre-order) — both Assembly also takes time.
The Luba 2 has four sturdy wheels of the same size on a long, low body. (More on why this particular shape makes the robot more resilient and creates those all-too-precious lines in the lawn later.) While the robot is mostly fine in natural conditions, Mammotion is well aware that the garage does help To protect your investment. On top of that, it also helps hide the robot slightly while it's docked - even the most weatherproof of devices can benefit from shelter. The GPS tower does not need to be installed in the same location as the docking station, but it can be if you place the docking station in the right location. The tower needs to have a direct line of sight to the sky and always needs to have a direct line of sight to the robot. Sometimes it's best to have the tower and dock in two different locations, but in my case I was able to place them close to the house, together, and it wasn't a problem. This has the added benefit of allowing the robot and tower to share a single power plug. If you separated them, you'd have to snake the tower's wire back to the outlet, and I'm having a hard time understanding how you could do that safely without burying it or the robot would just go right over it. Pro tip: Once the robot is up and running, you'll never pick it up—it has remote control capabilities. Assemble it close to where the base is placed as it is a bear that you carry around.
Many settings let you fine-tune the look of your lawn
Most of your interaction with the new robotic lawn mower happens in the app, and I was worried that my wifi wouldn't be strong enough to get through my yard, or that pairing would be a pain. This is not the case, this is the only lawn mower I have tested that paired on the first try. Some of the new Nest Pro wifi spots offer enough mesh to cover my neighbor's entire yard enough to work (remember, I'm mowing their lawn), and I found that even in the farthest reaches of the yard where the signal was weak, the Luba 2 The response was great. Every time you want to use the bot, you need to be connected to it, which means you need to be in range. Mammotion, like many such robots, relies on a combination of Bluetooth, wifi and 4G. You won't control the robot from your vacation home (although you can set a schedule for this). Within the app, you can control how short the grass should be cut and what pattern you want the robot to take on your lawn, from some zigzag pattern to a checkerboard pattern. These settings not only affect the appearance of your lawn, but also how well it is mowed. I tried all the settings over the course of a month, and it turned out that the random zigzag produced the best mowing results. Each time you send the robot on an unscheduled run, you can choose how many times it should run around the perimeter and how it should approach obstacles. Luba offers options favoring collision and travel, lidar, or both, and generally I found that only collision and travel had the best coverage, which surprised me. When I just had the robot experience obstacles by collision and having to navigate around them, rather than seeing them with lidar and trying to avoid them, I got much smaller avoidance areas.
Telling the lawnmower where to cut the grass is fun
Unlike a vacuum cleaner that just ventures out of the dock, visualizes and maps the space on its own, and then starts cleaning, most robotic lawn mowers (including the Luba 2) require you to map the space manually. The robot goes into remote control mode and you walk behind it and navigate around the space. This part is very interesting. You can draw additional "no-go areas" within a space, but I usually allow the robot to figure this out on its own as it bumps into a raised bed and navigates around it. If you have a flower bed with no clear walls, you will draw it as a no-go zone. You can draw as many spaces as you like and then connect them by building walkways between them. When you want to mow your lawn, simply select the areas you want and the mower will use the walkways to navigate to those areas.
Concerns about safety and security may be unfounded
One concern I have is that someone will steal the lawn mower, and to be honest, the manufacturers of these robots are not helpful in this regard. The units light up like beacons at night, with bright lights coming from both the GPS unit and the robot itself. The garage helped hide it a bit, and I turned the GPS unit so the light was pointed at the house, but in the dark it was still easy to see. I live in an area where people often swipe stuff from their entrances, and yet, within five weeks, Luba 2 was more of a neighborly curiosity than a target. The first week, out of concern for the robot and the flowerbed, I watched it every time it ran—more interesting than the robot were the neighbors' reactions. Everyone would stop and stare. They would take pictures and a few minutes later more people would arrive and they would all stare together. The car stopped and reversed to double-check that it was indeed a robot. They would talk to each other about the robots and ask questions.
This leads to my second concern about robots, which is liability and safety. While on the lawn, it probably won't encounter other humans or animals, certainly not at the speed it's moving (about half as fast as a human mowing lawn). However, it may encounter them when it travels on sidewalks and driveways between mowing areas. The Husqvarna team explains that this is the main differentiating feature between vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers, for the latter safety must come first. Therefore, all robots have a giant kill button on them. There is a large "stop" button on the Luba 2 that is easy to press. Additionally, the lawn mower itself is actually much smaller and less threatening than a traditional lawn mower, being just a few very small blades right in the center of the bottom of the robot. The mower stops when the robot is lifted or moved from a flat position. I tried many times to create scenarios where the blade might encounter a dog, cat, or child, but every time the mower would stop.
Luba 2 can navigate terrain better than other lawn robots
Before purchasing a robotic lawn mower, you should make some assessments, such as how big and level your lawn is. Some mowers are better suited for tilting, and some are better suited for smaller lawns that require navigating around a lot of tight spaces. Luba 2 is available in a variety of models, accommodating areas from 1,000 square feet to 10,000 square meters. It's not great for navigating in very tight spaces - it struggled around my streetlight, for example. Where the Luba 2 really excels is in navigating rough spaces. Some lawn robots have trouble navigating even small slopes or hills, but the Luba can easily navigate these spots and even large ditches. This is because the body is larger and has wheels on all four corners. It distributes weight in a way that is not affected by terrain or incline. According to the Husqvarna team, the weight of the mower affects how much you see these lines in the grass after mowing. Of the lawn mowers I've tested so far, only Mammotion makes them. In fact, Mammotion plans to offer lawn printing at some point in the future, where you can customize what you see on your lawn.
The best features (and those that aren’t important)
Mammotion has some features that feel inconsequential, like providing live video of the lawnmower in action. It's novel to look at the feed, but ultimately not very useful. One of the most useful features, the ability to manually control the lawn mower via remote control, doesn’t get talked about much. Even though the robot only got stuck twice in sixteen runs, instead of picking it up and walking out, I used the remote. Remember, lawn mowers are heavy. What no one says, and should say, about robot lawnmowers is a blissful silence. I lived for years between two happy lawnmowers, and the lawnmowers kept running in the summer and the noise was unbearable. Robotic lawn mowers are so quiet that you have to strain to hear them mowing. The cuttings themselves are shredded by the blades so that no cuttings can be removed from the lawn. Instead of long blades of grass, it's diced and left on the lawn, and you can't really tell even after a big chop. Both neighbors were very pleased with the robot's results. Just trimming the lines a little to clear the surrounding obstructions is enough.
Bottom line: Luba 2 gives you confidence in your robotic lawn mower
Ultimately, the Mammotion won me over as a robotic lawn mower. After the first week, you can only watch it as it leaves the dock and check back to make sure it returns. Then you grow to trust that it will work itself out. The model I tested, the Luba 2 AWD 5000, costs a staggering $2,899, but when I start thinking about what people are paying for lawn services now, it starts to make more sense. While a landscaper does more than just mow the lawn, taking the lawn off your plate may make the rest of your landscape easier to handle. Also, don't overlook how much labor mowing the lawn actually requires—if you live alone, it might be worth eliminating that labor, like not having to clean indoor floors. With the Mammotion's coverage, I was able to map it to four adjacent neighbors' lawns, which means you can easily spread the cost of the robot with other robots.
