Robot lawnmowers have long intrigued me, but I never really wanted one. After a few weeks with the Mammotion Luba 3, though, I’m sold, because this fixed my biggest issue with other models.
I’m all for smart home advancements, but a robot lawnmower was one I was never really a fan of. I like mowing my lawn, crazy as that sounds, and leaving that to a robot felt like more set up and maintain than it was going to be worth. Inevitably, though, curiosity won over. When Mammotion sent over the Luba 3 AWD mower, my attitude flipped.
The main reason for that boils down to how this mower operates. Unlike many others, which require the use of a boundary perimeter or RTK base station, the Mammotion Luba 3 operates with what’s called a “NetRTK,” which is effectively just a highly accurate satellite positioning system combined with LiDAR.
The results here really blew me away.
After mapping the robot to the areas of my yard I wanted it to work on, it stayed nearly perfectly within those lines, to the point where I actually had to go back and redo the lines. Initially, I’d set up several feet of buffer zone between the mower and the fairly-busy road in front of my lawn for fear that, if the positioning shifted, the mower might risk getting run over. The first two runs showed how misplaced that fear was. It hit its lines almost perfectly, which left plenty of room for me to adjust those lines much closer to the road. There’s still a small buffer, but I now know I can trust that Luba 3 isn’t going to go rogue into the road. It’s not without hiccups. Another part of the yard with a ditch left the mower stuck a couple of times when the positioning was off by a few inches, and a tough-to-access area of the property also proved tricky. But in most cases, it goes off without a hitch.
