Mammotion Luba 2 Is a Fantastic (Albeit Expensive) Robotic Lawn Mower
From the very beginning, I was skeptical about robotic lawnmowers. I imagined the robot mowing my flower beds and wondered why someone wouldn’t just pull the robot off the lawn and keep walking. Heck, I don’t even think you should grow a lawn , so it would be a big step for me to recommend a lawnmower. However, there’s no denying that robot mowers are here to stay, so I listed every neighbor’s lawn on my block and began testing a fleet of lawn mowers.
This process won me over for several reasons, and I am now the person who would recommend a robotic lawnmower to most people who have a lawn, as long as you can find the right one for your space. A robotic lawnmower virtually eliminates mowing noise, eliminates the hassle of mowing entirely, and can give your lawn a consistent look all year round. For medium to large lawns, I would recommend the Mammotion Luba 2 . It cut accurately and consistently and was rarely stopped by uneven conditions such as dips, hills, holes or obstacles. The $2,899 price tag is out of reach for many people, but if you regularly pay for lawn maintenance and/or have neighbors who can share the bot, it might be worth it.
Robotic lawnmowers are more than just outdoor robotic vacuum cleaners.
It’s tempting to compare robotic lawnmowers to robotic vacuum cleaners, but while robotic lawnmowers have certainly benefited from everything we’ve learned from robotic vacuum cleaners over the last 10 years, it may not be a fair ratio. I recently spoke with the engineering staff at Husqvarna, a pioneer in this field, and they helped me understand the additional challenges that robotic lawnmowers face outside in the elements. Inside your home, LiDAR is probably all you need to navigate, but outside, robots need GPS. If you want your bot to mow down to the flowerbed instead of all the way to the flowerbed, you’re talking about precision that comes down to inches. The same applies to boundaries where your lawn may intersect with your neighbor’s lawn. For this reason, most lawn cats once relied on an underground wire to determine the space within which they operated. It’s only in the last few years that these bots have gone wireless, trusting GPS to keep them on the straight and (sometimes) narrow path.
Any 2 assembly and installation
Luba 2 requires quite a bit of assembly complexity: there’s the robot itself, which requires a few parts to be connected and screwed together, such as the bumper, as well as the GPS tower and docking station, both of which also require some assembly. It took an hour to unpack all the components, assemble them, and then find a suitable location for the base and install everything on site. There are also additional components to consider, such as a garage ($149 pre-order), which is just a cover for the robot as it is otherwise exposed to the elements, and a wall mount for the GPS unit ($79 pre-order). ) – assembling both takes time.
Luba 2 has four durable wheels of equal size on a long, low body. (We’ll go into more detail later on why this particular shape makes the robot more resilient and results in those valuable lines on the lawn.) While the robot mostly copes with the elements, Mammotion makes it clear that the garage does help protect your investment. Among other things, this helped conceal the robot a bit when it was docked, and even the most weatherproof device could benefit from the cover. The GPS tower does not need to be installed in the same location as the docking station, but if you position the docking station correctly, it is possible. The tower needs a clear line of sight to the sky and must always have a clear line of sight to the robot. Sometimes the best way to do this is to place the tower and dock in two different locations, but in my case I was able to place them together next to the house and it wasn’t a problem. This has the added benefit that the robot and tower can share the same electrical plug. If you separate them, you’ll have to run the tower cord back to the outlet, and I struggled to figure out how to do this safely without burying it or the robot would fly over it. Pro tip: Once the robot is working, you will never pick it up – there is a remote control function. Collect it near where you will place the dock because you need to carry it with you.
Multiple settings allow you to fine-tune the appearance of your lawn.
Most of the interaction with your new robotic lawnmower happens in the app, and I was worried that my Wi-Fi wouldn’t be strong enough in the yard or would be difficult to pair with. This was not the case and this is the only lawn mower I have tested that paired on the first try. The mesh provided by some of the new Nest Pro Wi-Fi points covered my neighbors’ entire yard quite well (remember, I was mowing their lawn), and I found that even in the farthest corners of their yard, where the signal was weak, the Luba 2 responded fine . Every time you want to use the robot, you will need to connect to it, which means you need to be within range. Mammotion, like many other robots, uses a combination of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 4G. You won’t control the robot from your vacation home (although you can set up a schedule to do so). In the app, you can control how short the grass should be cut and what pattern the robot should move across the lawn, from multiple zigzag patterns to a checkerboard pattern. These settings not only affect the appearance of the lawn, but also the efficiency of mowing the lawn. I tried all the settings for a month and it turned out that the randomized zigzag gave the best mowing results. Each time you send your robot on an unscheduled run, you can choose how many times it should circle the perimeter and how to approach obstacles. Luba offers options that support bump and go, LiDAR, or both, and overall I found better coverage with just bump and go, which surprised me. When I simply let the robot encounter obstacles by bumping into them and going around them, rather than seeing them with LiDAR and trying to avoid them, I had smaller areas of evasion.
Telling the lawnmower where to cut is a lot of fun.
Unlike vacuum cleaners, which simply emerge from a dock, visualize and map the space on their own, and then begin cleaning, most robotic lawn mowers, including the Luba 2, require you to manually map the space. The robot goes into remote control mode, and you follow it and move around the perimeter of the space. This part was surprisingly fun. You can map additional “no-go” zones within the space, but I usually let the robot figure it out on its own as it bumped into and moved around the raised bed. If you had a flowerbed without a defined wall, you would designate it as a no-go zone. You can map as many spaces as you like and then connect them by creating walkways between them. When you want to mow, you simply select the areas you want and the mower will move along the paths to them.
Concerns about safety and security are likely unfounded.
One of my concerns was that someone would steal the lawn mower, and to be honest, the manufacturers of these robots are not helping in this area. At night, the devices light up like beacons: bright lights of the GPS module and the robot itself. The garage helps hide it a bit, and I angled the GPS so the light was pointed at the house, but in the dark it’s still pretty easy to see. I live in an area where people steal things from doorways, and yet in five weeks, Luba 2 has become more of a neighborhood curiosity than a target. The first week I watched it every time it started, out of fear for the robot and the flower beds – and even more interesting than the robot was the reaction of the neighbors. Everyone stopped and looked. They took pictures, and a few minutes later more people came and they all watched together. The cars stopped and backed up to double check if it was really a robot. They talked to each other about the robot and asked questions.
This led to the second concern I had about the robot – liability and safety. While on the lawn, he is not likely to encounter other people or animals, especially at the speed he is moving (about half the speed of a human mowing). However, when moving on sidewalks and driveways between mowing areas, he may collide with them. The Husqvarna team helped explain that this is the main differentiator between vacuum cleaners and mowers: for the latter, safety must be a top priority. For this reason, all robots have a giant kill button. The Luba 2 has a large STOP button that is easy to press. Plus, the lawn mower itself is actually much smaller and less dangerous than traditional lawn mowers, being just a few very small blades dead center on the bottom of the robot. The moment the robot rises or moves from a horizontal position, the lawn mower stops. I tried several times to create scenarios where the blades would collide with a dog, cat or child, and each time the lawn mower would simply stop.
The Luba 2 can navigate terrain better than other lawn mowers.
Before you buy a robotic lawn mower, you should do a few assessments, such as how big your lawn is and how level it is. Some lawn mowers work better on slopes, and some are better suited for small lawns that require navigating a lot of tight spaces. Luba 2 is available in models ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 square feet. It’s not very good at navigating through very narrow spaces – it had a hard time avoiding my path lights, for example. What the Luba 2 is really good at is navigating rough terrain. Some lawn robots had difficulty overcoming even a small dip or hill, but Lyuba easily overcame them and even a large trench. This is due to the larger body with wheels on all four corners. He managed to distribute the weight so that the wheels were not hampered by terrain or inclines. According to the Husqvarna team, the weight of the mower affects how well you can see the lines in the grass after cutting. Of the mowers I’ve tested so far, only Mammotion makes them. In fact, at some point in the future, Mammotion plans to offer lawn printing where you can customize what you see on your lawn.
Best Features (And Those That Don’t Matter)
Mammotion has some features that seem extraneous, such as the ability to watch live video of the lawnmower in action. It’s unusual to look at the tape for a moment, but it’s not very helpful in the long run. One of the most useful features—the ability to manually control your lawn mower using a remote control—isn’t talked about enough. Although the bot only got stuck twice in sixteen runs, instead of picking it up and pulling it out, I just used the remote. Remember, the lawnmower is heavy. What no one mentions or should mention about robotic lawn mowers is the blessed silence. I lived for many years between two happy men, and in the summer the lawn mowers were constantly running and the noise was unbearable. Robotic lawn mowers are so quiet that you have to strain to hear them cutting. The cuttings themselves are so crushed by the blades that it is impossible to tear yourself away from the lawn. Instead of long blades of grass, it’s simply cut into cubes and left on the lawn, and you can’t really tell, even after a big trim. Both neighbors are very pleased with the results of the robots. All it takes is a small trim of the line to clear obstructions.
Bottom line: Luba 2 will give you confidence in robotic lawnmowers.
Eventually, Mammotion convinced me to get into robotic lawn mowing. After the first week, you’ll only watch it when it leaves the dock and check it again to make sure it’s back. Then you will believe that he is doing it on his own. The cost is a staggering $2,899, but when I started thinking about what people pay for lawn maintenance these days, it started to make more sense. While landscapers do more than just mow the lawn, taking the lawn off your plate can make the rest of your landscape manageable for you. Also, don’t overlook how labor-intensive mowing the lawn actually is—if you live alone, eliminating that work may be worth it, as will not having to clean the floors inside. Thanks to Mammotion’s range, I was able to match it to four neighboring neighbors’ lawns, meaning you can easily split the cost of the bot with others.